• Your charity has a stand at a festival and you want to stand out. Go to Bing and search for massive branded inflatable dancers.
• Your business needs a new card reader. Go to DuckDuckGo and search card readers for business.
• It’s your anniversary and you’ve forgotten to get your spouse anything. Go to Yahoo and search for romantic restaurants near me.
• You need help with your marketing. Go straight to aubrey-marketing.co.uk!

All these examples (apart from the last one) require SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines help you, as the potential customer, find the most appropriate websites based on your search terms. SEO helps organisations get found by potential supporters and customers by ensuring a prominent position on search engine’s result pages.

Everyone involved in marketing should optimise their website for search engines. After all, you want your website to come at the top of your potential customers’ results and above your competition.

The other way to get your page at the top is to do some paid advertising. Next week, we have an exciting guest blog from Jordan Farrar, from Akoca SEO, who will delve into PPC.

Back to this week. Let’s look at how search engines work and then some tips about how best to optimise your website for search engines.

How search engines work

Search engines send out software agents known as crawlers or spiders to read and extract the key information from a website. When this information is collected, it enables the search engine to return the most relevant results for a search. Spiders will pick up on all types of information and every search engine is set up slightly differently so there is no magic formula to make a page return the top result for a search term on every search engine. Typically, they will spot keywords, metadata, activity, links in and out of the site, etc. This helps the search engine decide the quality and relevance of the webpage.

Your task when you do SEO, is to convince the spiders that your website is relevant and high quality.

Best practice

Like most things in life, there are different ways to achieve your objectives. Typically, in SEO, we see good practices (White Hat) and bad practices (Black Hat). There’s debate around where the line is between these practices (this gives us Grey Hat practices) and some experts argue that any practice is legitimate if it is achieving the goal of reaching the top of the results pages.

However, search engines don’t like to be duped (legitimately or otherwise) so if they spot Black Hat practices, they may delist a website altogether. Let’s look at some of the best practices we at Aubrey use (and encourage you to use) to optimise websites for search engines.

Identify the keywords

You want to be found by the people who want to buy your product or support your cause so you need to use the keywords they are searching for. Tools like WordStream’s key word tool will help you find the best keywords. Make sure you are using these in your content but don’t go over the top or search engines will suspect that you are trying to artificially inflate your relevance.

Add relevant, high quality content

Search engines can monitor how long a person stays on a page and where they go next. By providing the content they are looking for, you demonstrate the usefulness and relevance of your site.

Add relevant metadata

The metadata (things like page descriptions) can also be indexed by search engines so it is sensible to use the keywords you have identified here too. This highlights your site’s relevance and moves you up the results.

Get links

A page that is linked to and from will appear more authoritative and helpful. For the best SEO results, link to other relevant, trustworthy sites and make sure that you promote your webpages in various places like social media and blog directories.

Make your site easy to navigate

The spiders like an easy-to-use webpage to index. To give them the best possible chance, avoid large images that take too long to load, keep your webpage addresses relevant to the content on the page, and don’t rely on graphics to convey too much textual information.

Conclusion

It might seem that optimising your website for search engines is a lot of work; you’d be right. It is worth it though! 39% percent of purchasers made their decision as the result of a relevant search. If your organisation isn’t on that first page of results, then your potential customers and supporters will go to your competitors.