{"id":2308,"date":"2021-11-11T10:24:02","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T10:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/?p=2308"},"modified":"2021-11-11T10:24:02","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T10:24:02","slug":"ensuring-search-engines-can-find-your-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/ensuring-search-engines-can-find-your-site\/","title":{"rendered":"Ensuring search engines can find your site"},"content":{"rendered":"

So – you\u2019ve created a website.\u00a0 What do you need to do next \u2026.. promote it and help people find it.\u00a0 Ensuring search engines can find your site is relatively easy for the most part.\u00a0 The important thing to remember is the 80:20 rule –\u00a0 That last little bit is likely to take more effort and that\u2019s when you might want to consider employing someone to help.<\/span><\/p>\n

Currently the world share of Google is 92% of the market.\u00a0 So it\u2019s important to get the basics right; you obviously need to make sure that you’ve got good content and we talked a lot about that in the last episode of our podcast, you can listen <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the past, Google used bots and spiders to crawl the internet and follow links.\u00a0 If your website was linked to others, it went through every page and walked off with all the information it gathered and visited other websites linked to yours.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, there are now lots of new developer tools to help you set up your website for basic search engine optimisation. \u00a0 The first thing, and most important thing to consider is – what is the actual phrase that someone’s going to use to put into Google to find what you do?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s not necessarily going to be your business name, that’s the one phrase that you don’t need to worry about too much (it will naturally occur in the content of your website and it’s usually in your URL, which is the website address).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What you’re actually looking for is that phrase that will bring in business from people who don’t know about you.\u00a0 Talk to friends and colleagues who know what you do – ask them how they would find you.\u00a0 Test your phrase, see what results you get in Google and if your competitors are there.\u00a0 There\u2019s no point trying to compete with large, global companies for search rankings as they are spending huge amounts of money to appear on the first page of results.\u00a0 Consider your target market and think about a more local or regional approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

For sites built in WordPress, there are lots of plugins that can help you optimise your website.\u00a0 One of the most highly recommended, and the main one we use is called Yoast.\u00a0 We\u2019ve also used Rank Math, which is a relative newcomer but also has some useful features (look out for our blog article coming soon, which compares both).<\/span><\/p>\n

They are both free and allow you to add search terms onto your pages.\u00a0 You should never really use the same search term on every single page, as this would be missing an opportunity to promote what you do.\u00a0 However, even if you don\u2019t have that many different phrases, try and make it relevant – about your business, products, services or people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another tool we\u2019ve talked about before is Google my Business.\u00a0 Make sure you register your website there because if you’ve got results, it’s shown in the panel that appears on the right hand side of Google.\u00a0 You can add a picture, your address, a map, opening hours etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other thing we would recommend, which is also free – is to set up Google analytics. There is a plugin you install together with a code and it will give you data about how people are finding your website, which pages they’re going to and where they’re coming from. You can use these insights to help you focus on how to improve your SEO and your search terms.<\/span><\/p>\n

So how do I actually set it up?<\/b><\/p>\n

So we\u2019ve loaded Yoast and chosen our search term.\u00a0 We\u2019re now going to put that into the meta title and add a meta-description,which is a description of what the page is about (when the listings come up in Google, the meta-description is text below the result).<\/span><\/p>\n

Following the prompts from Yoast, you can then finesse the settings on your page – including internal links to other parts of your website and external links to other sites which may be of interest to your visitor.\u00a0 The other thing to consider is <\/span>alt tags on images<\/b>. Every image should have a tag which describes the image.\u00a0 It originated as a tool for visually impaired people but with the vast improvements in website accessibility standards that have been made in recent years, it has now become standard best practice.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By adding your search term into your image alt tag, you also have a further opportunity to improve your SEO.\u00a0 This also goes for content too – base your content around your key search term so that it appears in as frequently as is possible, without disrupting the flow of your message.<\/span><\/p>\n

Google finding your website is one thing, but how well your website ranks is another aligned issue.\u00a0 We\u2019ve written an article about Core Web Vitals, which is used as part of Google’s algorithm for ranking your website and the content in there. So it’s worth at least checking your score to see if you can do anything to improve it – see our blog article <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 Get in touch if we can help you check your core web vitals score.\u00a0 <\/span>Getting higher rankings on search engines means more people and more business going through your website<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So – you\u2019ve created a website.\u00a0 What do you need to do next \u2026.. promote it and help people find it.\u00a0 Ensuring search engines can find your site is relatively easy for the most part.\u00a0 The important thing to remember is the 80:20 rule –\u00a0 That last little bit is likely to take more effort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[22],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2308"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2312,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions\/2312"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kehorne.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}