No SEO No Hope Wicked Spider Wolverhampton

No SEO? No Hope?

Table of Contents

Introduction

Welcome to the most important blog post you will ever read. Get this right and your website will bring you enquiries and sales – believe me I know and I’m in probably the most competitive industry there is online and I get phone calls regularly from my website. I’ve also helped other businesses have websites that not only help build their credibility but actually attract business.

So you haven’t done the SEO on your website and by default your website designer probably hasn’t done the full works either, unless you paid extra for it (unless I’m your web designer of course – excuse the cheeky self promotion). Does a lack of SEO mean a lack of business? Not necessarily so (breaks into song). You can recover the situation if you start now. Carrying on reading to find out how….you won’t regret it – honestly.

SEO – a quick and dirty definition

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It is a two pronged technical method for making your website attractive to Google. This means that your website appears in front of more relevant people. It can happen.

Let me explain the two pronged approach: the first prong is your website itself and the other prong is the digital world that it lives on (or in?). I’ve recently started a garden so let me use a gardening metaphor. Your website is the plant and the soil is the world it lives in. The plant needs good genes and needs nurturing before it’s put in the earth; the earth needs nutrients and doesn’t need weeds. To unpack that for you, your website needs to tick some SEO boxes (onsite SEO) and the internet, the place it resides, needs to look after it (offsite SEO) – and you can do both.

For the purposes of this article I’ll just talk about the website itself. To be honest, if you look after the website well then the offsite SEO is a bonus (a bonus that will bring its rewards let me add).

Relevant SEO Content

Do you have more than one string to your bow? Lots of people do and they naturally only really want 1 website to cover it all. The problem with this is that you are sending mixed messages. Let me give you an example from my own world. By day I run Wicked Spider, a web design business, and then in the evenings and weekends I am The Wicked Artist. I could have a single website that covered both aspects – and believe me it would make life easier, even for me! BUT I would be sending very, very mixed messages out to the internet. Google wouldn’t know what my website was about. Was it about website design or was it about art? It’s as simple as that. A website that has a clear subject matter will do better in the search results than a site that is about two completely different subjects. Note, I’ve said “completely different”. If you have two strings to your bow and there is a semantic relevancy you may be OK. But in most cases it is better to have separate websites for each of your unrelated businesses. To give you another example: if you build houses by day and create designer T-shirts in your spare time, for instance, then go for two websites.

Relevant SEO Image Names

I have another blog post all about optimising images for the internet but it is the file name that I am referring to here. I’ve no idea what the file names are for the photos on my phone but I do know that they are irrelevant and are probably gobbledegook. If you use a standalone camera then the file names are certainly not descriptive. And by descriptive I mean that the file name says what the image is about. If you take a photo of a lime tree, change the file name to “lime-tree” if you are a tree surgeon; if you take a photo of your new herbal treatment room change the file name to “herbal-treatment-room”; if you have a photo of yourself delivering a training session then name it “Tosca-Lahiri-WordPress-Training”. You don’t need a special app to rename the files, just use the operating system on your favourite computer.

What you are doing by changing the file name, is adding more data about your business into Google. Then there is more relevant information for Google to show searchers (is that a word?).

Relevant SEO Titles

The SEO title is to Google what pollen is to bees….sweet! The title tag is in the code behind your website that you either can’t face or don’t want to even consider – and why should you! The good news is that most website builders give you easy access to change the SEO title tag. If you want to see where the SEO title tags appear have a look at this extremely short SEO Title Tag video.

What do you include in the SEO title tag? The short, easy answer is a word or phrase that people will type into Google to find what they are looking for. Sometimes you will want to add a town or city to be location specific. That is really what it comes down to.

Easy SEO

If all of that has given you a headache I do understand – it gives me one too sometimes 😉 If you can’t face planning the content on your website pages and keeping them all on message; if you don’t have the time to rename your images after you’ve got them off your phone or camera and if the SEO title tags look a bit overwhelming, there is an easier way…..yes there is!

And I’m not going to tell you to give me a call and pay me to do it for you – I’m really not. All you have to do is add a blog to your website and write and write and write as if your life depended on it. As much as you can and as often as you can – write.  Write about what you do all day in your business; write about your experience; write about how you help people; write about changes in your industry; write about your office dog…..yes I did write that.

Let me give you an example of what I could write about quite easily on my art website (not finished yet..web designers are like builders – never finishing their own extra projects). I could write posts about styles of painting such as “abstract art”, “expressionism” and ‘outsider art’. I could write about art movements such as the Surrealists, the Dadaists and the Cubists. I could also write about where the various colours come from, their chemical properties and their relation to other colours in the colour wheel. I think you get that and can apply the principle to your own specialist are.

I can hear you thinking now….”how long should my blog posts be?” – stop that thought now….just write. I can hear you saying to yourself…”how many blog posts should I write”? STOP just write.

SEO is easy if you write.

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