Designing a website with your brand in mind is challenging at the best of times, on-page SEO is time-consuming, but if followed out correctly you will get the intended results on the search engines. Did you know that carrying out search engine optimisation (SEO) is of little or no use if your website is not set up correctly to allow the search engines to find and identify your content as relevant?
One question you need to be asking yourself is: “Is my website SEO ready?”
We have listed 6 additional questions below that you need to be asking yourself and your website designer when creating or updating a website for your business.
1. Is your website domain name user-friendly: be sure to have an SEO-friendly URL that has a keyword or keyword phrase within it, make sure the URL makes sense and describes what the webpage is all about. This is both good for the search engines to identify its purpose and to rank it accordingly, but this is also beneficial for its users who are searching for the products or services.
Keep it simple, easy to read, and if possible, make it easy to remember.
Suggestions:
a) Experiment with Keyword-only URL’s these have proven to be easier to rank. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, so remember what applies today, may not necessarily apply in the future. (December 2018).
b) Avoid using non-readable or default assigned URL’s, if the URL makes no sense to a human being, it simply won’t perform as well as if it was in a readable format.
2. Make sure the keywords used are appropriate to the cause: You will need to use the keywords that can be related to your product, service or brand, this allows the search engines to categorise you correctly and to rank you accordingly.
3. Make sure you use unique content: Always create and upload unique content to
your website, do not copy and paste content from other websites or internet sources. Information taken or gathered from third parties and that has not been written or researched by yourself will not pass as your own. The Search engines have a content checking algorithm in place, that can very quickly identify if you have written the blog or content yourself or if you have copied it from someone else. The best ranking websites rely on unique content only, so if you want to outrank your competitors please bear this in mind.
4. Make sure your website is responsive: A responsive website should function well on all screen sizes and on all modern mobile devices that the end user (your customer) may be using when they visit the website. Long gone are the days when websites only needed to run on a PC or desktop computer, with the number of smartphones, tablet computers, smart watches and mobile devices now out numbering the use of PCs, websites now need to be designed to ensure the user experience is maintained; no matter which device the website is viewed upon. This process is called “Responsiveness”. Having a responsive website to improve the user experience has become so important to the end user, that the search engines will no longer rank your website high in the results, if the end-user experience is not of the same high quality across all devices.
5. Does your website have an XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap guides search engine spiders otherwise known as bots, to understand your website structure and its content easier when it is crawled. Failing to add a sitemap to your website may result in your content being overlooked or missed when the spiders crawl your content. The larger the website the more likely it will become that some of your content may be missed and therefore will not be indexed by search engines. For this reason, websites that do not have a sitemap tend to rank lower in the search engines.
6. Heading and Meta Tags: Make sure you use your headings and Meta description tags to emphasise the importance of the content on your website. This makes it easier for the search engines to understand which information is of value to your users and will highlight an important message to the search engines for them to show in their results page. When we search content on the search engine’s we are provided with a wide range of results for us to choose from. These results are gathered using the information highlighted upon websites using the heading and meta description tags and will be ranked accordingly based on the Search Engine algorithm. Heading tags do not just have an impact on usability but affect your SEO too, websites failing to correctly make use the headings and meta descriptions will find they are less likely to appear in the search results for a given keyword or key phrase.
Finally:
Once the above has been completed, you are now at least on the right path to successfully promoting your website on the search engines. On-page SEO in combination with the correct number of high-quality backlinks and online marketing services otherwise known as off-page SEO or SEO for short, can in time improve your Search Engine Rank Position (SERP). SEO is a trust-building process for the search engines, only the best content and the most trusted websites will rank at the top of the results page. The Search Engines are constantly evolving and improving their algorithms to ensure that only the very best unique and resource rich content is shown to its users to choose from. Remember, the Search Engines are directories, there purpose is not to rank websites, but to provide answers to questions posed by their users. If your content is of a higher quality to that of your competitors and if it meets the criteria of the Search Engines’, then your website should show in the results page higher than content that is of less relevance to the search query. Remember content relevance is decided by the search Engine, so it is important to realise that just because you deem something to be of higher importance it does not necessarily follow that the Search Engine will agree with your findings and rank other content higher.
When an idea develops into a business opportunity, this is commonly referred to as a startup business or "startup" for short.
However, there is one thing that all startups have in common; they all require an online presence in the form of a blog or website, for example, to share and promote their products and services for others to buy.
Creating a new website can be a stressful experience, many startups may even consider trying to build their own website to keep the costs down, alternatively they may decide to hire an experienced web designer or web development company to help bring their business ideas to life for them. However, web designers and developers can be very expensive and sometimes the cost of these services can be very vague or unclear, raising the risk of encountering hidden charges that may not have been taken into consideration within the initial business plan and could prove fatal to a small startup with a limited budget.
For that reason, many startups and small to medium businesses today are choosing to embrace new and more modern ways of working such as ‘Rent a website’ services. Rent a website services remove the need for risk and binding contracts, so they are ideally suited to startups and small to medium sized businesses today.
Rent a Website's provide a totally 100% scalable online service offering, removing the need for minimum term agreements and providing a clear and transparent pricing model from the offset. There are no hidden charges whatsoever with Rent a website services and they provide a tailored approach to meeting the needs of any modern-day business looking to keep running costs to a minimum whilst remaining 100% flexible in their approach. Startup businesses can also benefit from the product scalability of a Rent a website offering, as they allow businesses to upgrade their services when business is on the up and downgrade them again should times get tough.
Startups who choose to rent their website instead of going down the old-fashioned route of hiring in a web designer and/or developer will benefit as there are no hidden charges and they can rely on an expert team to carry out all the work for them on their behalf, allowing them to concentrate on running a business and not worrying about their cash flow.
Rent a Website services should include the cost of the website build, website hosting, On-page SEO, monthly updates and a time bank for any monthly changes needed, the charges vary and can start from as little as £9.99 per month depending on the level of service required. Rent a website services should also be easily upgraded to include other services such as professional email, Search Engine Optimisation, XML sitemaps and more.
Why keeping the cost of development down is so important?
Building a website for your startup business could end up costing thousands of pounds and once you add up all the additional charges for possible changes needed to complete them this can easily spiral out of control. Bear in mind, that you may need to pay additional charges for on-page SEO or hidden services charges if the service over runs, or last-minute changes are required. It is also worth bearing in mind that updates and backups can at times be very time-consuming depending on the size of the website, so when taking out such services these should always be included as part of the project.
Key benefits of a Rent a Website service:
100% transparency, just one monthly charge to cater for all your needs
100% scalable to suit your business model
No contracts or minimum term
No hidden charges for hosting, backups or on-page SEO
Expert team of professional web designers on call
Personal account manager
SEO Flatrate provides a wide range of services for all types of online businesses throughout the UK and for most English speaking countries globally. We offer bespoke consultation for startups as well as established businesses. We can assist you in securing your domain name for your new business idea. Feel free to contact us today for a free consultation and to help you get your business off the ground.
If you would like to hear more about our services please contact the SEO Flatrate team 01202 911141 or email the office, we are here Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm
A philosopher once said - ‘what’s in a name’; but when choosing the correct domain name for your business, this could be the key to your success. In this modern digital world. the "WWW" or the "World Wide Web" as we now know it, has uncountable websites and they are increasing rapidly on a day by day basis. So, if you want to help your business to the top of the search engines, you may need to be a little more selective about your business’ domain name than you had originaly thought.
Here are 5 tips you may want bear in mind:
1. It has to be short and related to your business niche - make sure you choose the closest available domain name possible.
2. Additionally, the name needs to be catchy and memorable if possible, or people won’t be able to remember it.
3. Choose the correct extension for your domain name for maximum efficiency. Example:
If you plan on starting up a car repair business, then your domain name could be carrepair.co.uk, make sure you steer away from domain-names like friendlyrepairman.org as such names can be harder to identify.
4. Furthermore, you should try to to use a related keyword in the domain name for better SEO results. Just like in the previous example: ‘car repair’ could then also become your seed keyword for the website, this will assist your online marketing for your website too and help you get found on the search engines.
5. Try to avoid hyphens or numbers in your domain, thats because they can often be misunderstood by the user or your viewer. Going back to our example, you would not want a name like www.car-repair123.com unless you have the additonal branding and marketing budget to invest in marketing it.
Significantly, choosing a domain name is like creating a brand or logo for your business. It needs to feel right. Research it, try several domain name providers, compare pricing then you may find the best domain-name first time round. You need to research and purchase the right domain name before anyone else steals it away from you, otherwise you may end up having to buy it back from an online broker and that could prove to be an expensive excercise.
Finally, when you have the right domain-name in your basket, don't waste time thinking about it as this may result in someone else securing it before you do. Buy it and let the journey begin. Remember even the longest journey always starts with the first step.
SEO Flatrate provides a wide range of services for all types of online businesses throughout the UK and for most English speaking countries globally. We offer bespoke consultation for startups as well as established businesses. We can assist you in securing your domain name for your new business idea. Feel free to contact us today for a free consultation and to help you get your business off the ground.
If you would like to hear more about our services please contact the SEO Flatrate team 01202 911141 or email the office, we are here Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm
