Posts Tagged ‘seo plan’

Site Success Means Standing Out

Does your site stand out? No matter how attractive your site is in your eyes, only truly remarkable sites have a chance of obtaining amazing results on the net. Your SEO plan can be the key to making your site the most attractive option available on the search engine results pages.

Search engine optimisation can sometimes seem like a chore, but it is a great opportunity to refresh your business. Your SEO work is likely to make significant improvements on your site simply by strengthening your structure and making clear paths for users to travel on. You can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about these aspects of optimisation. Optimisation is also a great opportunity to improve your site’s visibility. This can mean asking some tough questions:

• Urgency: Why should internet users visit your site today? This isn’t a question very frequently considered in SEO, but it should be. Find a reason for your users to access your site immediately and convey that urgency in your title and description tags

• Objective interest: How are you interesting from an outsider’s point of view? One of the big challenges of SEO is objectivity. It’s one of the many reasons companies seek help from a professional SEO company when optimising their site. A very valuable ability is to be able to look at your site as an objective person would see it. If you don’t have this ability, it can be worthwhile getting someone from outside your business to assess your site. Even getting a friend to look over it can be a big help

• Specific interest: How exciting is your site? Realistically, not every site can have the ‘wow’ factor, and yours doesn’t have to. All you need is enough of the ‘wow’ factor for your industry. That might mean taking a new approach to your subject or presenting your business in a new way. Many sites base their success on being the first to feature a blog or the only ones to interact with their users

• Competitive factors: How do you compare to your competitors? You can get a lot of information on how to do well by studying your competitors. Many businesses use their most successful competitors as a model when they’re trying to establish a foothold in the industry or in the search engines. While your competitors can provide you with some useful tips, particularly with their SEO methods, it’s important not to follow them too closely. A successful business is one that stands out from the crowd

• Audience: Are you appealing to a specific audience? One of the most important factors in your SEO is targeting the right audience. If your SEO is off-focus, your whole campaign will need adjusting down the track. Some sites are unfocussed because they’re too scared to really target their ideal user groups. This generally produces mediocre results, as the sites are casting a big net that doesn’t catch the right kind of fish. Focussing on your ideal user group might reduce your scope, but it increases your chance of success. Find the right target user group and concentrate on them

Keep On-Page Objects Simple For SEO Purposes

Search engine optimisation is often concerned with optimising your code, architecture and text-based content, but SEO doesn’t stop there. It’s important not to overlook the other elements of your pages, such as objects, in your SEO plan. It’s vital to find ways to optimise your on-page objects.

Sometimes, the optimisation process is simple. For example, optimising images is a simple case of ensuring that they are re-sized at the file level before being uploaded to the server and optimising file names. When doing this, it is important that you are placing the right tags and content around them to get them noticed by the search engines. Other forms of on-page objects are more complicated to deal with as they involve lots of other factors. PDFs, the popular portable document format, are a perfect example of this.

Example: PDF optimisation

PDFs are a complex on-page object that is fairly common. Many businesses use PDFs to present important documents online or to provide an alternate way for users to access complex content. Using a PDF can be a great way to protect your content. It’s also a great way to protect against different browsers mucking up complex charts or graphics.

The main objective: size it down

A PDF generally represents a smaller file size than the document it originated from, but there are still ways to size it down. Like any on-page object, the smaller you can get your PDFs, the better it is for your SEO. A slow load time will discourage both users and the major search engines.

• Reduce the complexity: PDFs are only as light as their content allows them to be. When you use multiple fonts, numerous images, graphs and other multimedia content, the weight of the PDF increases

• Lighten objects within the PDF: The images and graphics contained within the PDF count toward its weight, so you should perform the usual steps of resizing and downscaling resolution where you can

• Grayscale it: Just as with images, colour PDFs are larger files. If you don’t need colour, remove it

• Allow for best compression: The default settings on most versions of Acrobat are for print, rather than the web. As printers require far better resolution, this means files saved with those settings are much larger than needed

These steps are specific to PDFs, but many of these factors apply to other on-page objects. Some objects, like embedded applications, take a bit of programming knowledge to optimise. It can be helpful to get the advice of an SEO expert when trying this complex form of SEO, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult.

Why bother optimising objects?

Your on-page objects may or may not be readable by a search engine spider, but their existence on your pages makes a big difference. If for nothing else, you should optimise your objects to reduce their weight on your pages, and decrease your page load times. Also, as they take up room on your pages, it’s best to do whatever you can to make your objects work for your comprehensive SEO plan.