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If you position yourself well around the net, users will be landing on pages all over your site. Mostly, however, they will be landing on your home page. It’s there for a reason. Use it to sell your business.
Your home page is central to the success of your search engine optimisation campaign. It will be the first thing that most people see. It will, therefore, be the gateway to your site for a large percentage of your traffic, and have a major influence on your bounce rate. The way to keep that gate open is to provide enticing content which contains a hint of the information your site’s users are looking for. If your site has a number of uses, you need to demonstrate those branches efficiently. You also need to effectively sell your business, convincing the user to hang around long enough to sell the individual service or product suited to them.
The angles you take to sell your home page will depend on the strengths of your business. It can also be tricky to know exactly what to brag about without saying too much. You can talk to us at SEO Consult when you’re wondering about the best way to structure your home page. Identify your strengths, and then subtly display them.
Best quality: If your business has won any awards or received any accolades, it’s a good idea to hint at them on your home page. Your home page is not the place to list all of the quotes from reviews, but if you’ve received a particularly notable review, featuring it below your logo or somewhere equally prominent will assert the quality level of your site. Most awards come with a logo these days which you can use for display.
Lowest prices: If your site has any e-commerce, you’re probably already familiar with the attraction of a bargain. If you have absolute bargains on your site, let your users know right from the start on your home page. Displaying the prices of one or two of your most popular products will provide users with a guideline without being too pushy.
More variety than competitors: If your business strength is that you offer a broader range of products or services, show this edge. A simple ‘number of products sold’ box, a list of categories or a summary of services transmits this message. This is also great for your SEO, as it provides a place to feature all of your keywords and hyperlink them to relevant pages.
Better customer service: This is one of the easier things to hint at. If your customer service is excellent, you’re likely to have received positive feedback. Feature this in a quote box on your home page. Changing the quote frequently assures return visitors that many of your customers like your business. Displaying feedback is also a way of providing feedback to your customers, reassuring them that their opinions do matter. This in turn can generate more positive feedback and build the community around your site.
Tags: Homepage Design, Homepage Layout, Homepage Optimisation, Homepage SEO
Posted in Web Design on March 17th, 2010 by Nick | No Comments »
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How do you get links? This is something every newcomer to search engine optimisation tends to find themselves asking after a while, possibly accompanied by a scratch of the head. Getting a good link profile is possibly the hardest part of SEO. Getting one that will still be good in a year’s time is even harder.
SEO experts have come up with all sorts of tips and tricks when it comes to building link profiles. You can buy links. You can use online directories. You can form a reciprocal relationship for links. You can use article directories. You can do a thousand and one things that get you an easy link, but in the end, an easy link isn’t going to be of the best quality. If your links aren’t quality, they’re unlikely to weather the storm when Google and the other search engines change their algorithms.
Protecting yourself against banned techniques
Some of the above techniques aren’t exactly smiled upon by the search engines, and that may turn out to be a problem for your site. Although your SEO company should do whatever it can to ensure that your optimisation stays within Google’s guidelines, those guidelines are pretty vague. They also aren’t solid over a length of time. When you’re building on your own, you’re on even more unsteady ground. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about the advantage of experience when it comes to SEO.
A certain amount of future-proofing needs to be taken into account when you’re building your link profile. It’s much better to spend your time on getting a small amount of quality links than spending it on getting a large number that will be banned in the next algorithm change.
What to look for in a link
*The page is already in the index. This is the basic requirement. If the page is not in Google’s index, it cannot pass any link juice to you. This makes linking to new sites a bad idea.
*The page has a decent ranking, one at least equal to your own. Getting links from low-ranking sites is like associating with a bad business in Google’s eyes.
*A decent linking strategy on their part. If the linking site provides links to lots of dissociated sites, there is a chance that Google will devalue its links.
All links count for something
It’s important to remember that all links count for something. None of your linking efforts are really wasted. This gives you a little freedom to experiment when you’re trying to get some links in. Even if you land a link and later find out that it’s a nofollow, and therefore of little direct worth to your SEO, that link can still bring traffic to your site. It doesn’t hurt to chase quality links.
A link coming into your site can’t get you into much trouble. It’s the links going out of your site that you really need to watch. Work on your links, work on quality, and your profile will accumulate worth over time.
Tags: google guidelines, link juice, link profiles, low-ranking sites, nofollow
Posted in SEO Copywriting on March 17th, 2010 by Peter | No Comments »
