SEO

Whilst we have known this for a while, on Friday Google officially announced that site speed is a factor in how websites are ranked.

Your choice of web host has an affect on your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign. This post looks at what factors matter for SEO when you choose a host, and how you can use this information to find a host that's right for you.

Why does hosting matter?

Search engines look at a number of factors when they rank websites, and these are aimed at making sure:

Our third article is about to be published in TV Bay Magainze (www.tv-bay.com)

Inbound links are good. Google sees them, and ranks your site higher, the more inbound links it finds to your site. Some links are better than others. A link from a site that Google ranks highly, will be seen as more important than a link from a site that Google gives a low rank to.

Directories rank high.

They offer free links to your website.

Search engines look for descriptive words throughout your site. They place emphasis on words in certain areas. One of the most important are "alt" tags for your images.

An "alt" tag is simply an alternative text message, that you would display should the image not be required - for example in a text based browser or on a mobile phone.

Ever wondered about how many people are searching for your offering online? Is it an increasing or decreasing market? Should you be focused on the same keywords now as you were six months ago?

Try this: Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends

Ben

If you haven't done it yet, get yourself added to Google Local Businesses. It takes five minutes, it's free, and it will help your search engine optimisation massively - (after all these results are placed very high on the google results page).

Find out more here: http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?gl=GB&hl=en-US

Just one note of caution.

Don't try and do it in Google Chrome. Google's software doesn't seem to do a very good job of running Google's website. Hmm...

Do you track where your leads come from?

Tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is vital to making them work. Until you know which approach works best, you won't know how to adapt and evolve your marketing properly. Find out from your leads by asking them, or better still, by sending them to your organisation via a filter of some kind:

Breadcrumbs are very easy to add to a website. They very simply tell the user where they are in relation to the other pages of a site. i.e.

Home > Products > Awesome Product 1

It's very easy to forget that people come to your site from a variety of means and angles. It's rare that all your visitors will end up on your "home page", especially if they find you in a search engine. Adding the extra layer of help adds tremendous value.

Google Analytics is an awesomely powerful tool. In this very brief guide, I'll explain why you should have it, and then show you how to get it up and running (it really is simple).