There's a lot of mystery around SEO, but the basics are pretty straightforward. Before you even consider doing anything fancy, get the basics right! This is time consuming and can therefore cost you a lot if you get someone else to do it for you. Optimising your site is an on-going process, so it makes sense to work through this analysis yourself and understand how it works, as you're going to need to review it on a regular basis. There are 3 steps to analysing your site for SEO:

1. Research the right key words
2. Ensure your site is optimised for your key words
3. Compare your site to your competitors' sites and determine what you need to do to improve those areas where you're not as good

You'll already have identified the key words for your site. How do you know that these are actually the words that people search for? Google gives you a tool that answers that question and tells you other related phrases that people search for as well. Start with the key words you've already identified. Plug these words into the Google Keyword Tool, and you'll get a list of related search terms with the number of searches.

Some of these will be relevant and some will be related but not relevant to your business. Select the ones that are relevant and look through them to see if there are some other keywords that you're missing. Remember that search results are very specific; a search for accountancy will work differently from a search for accountant. A quick way of seeing the key words that are used is to scroll down and on the left-hand side you'll find a list of key words and how many searches contain them. You will still need to look through the list of search terms to see what's relevant for your business and how many actual searches were done.

It's important to make sure that your keywords are included in all the relevant places. We set up your site to have the structure that search engines like. This includes having the right title, using headers and alternative text for images, and a footer with the right information in it. All of these should contain your keywords.

We put your initial keywords in these for you. You can update them whenever you need to. Most important is the quality of the text on your site. If you have good content, you will move up the rankings, although be aware that this can take some time. To start with, ensure that your front page has solid content. The rules on writing website content still apply, so you need to write carefully, with your key points at the top.

The search engines are trying to determine how relevant your site is to the person who's searching, so the more content you have that is clearly relevant to their search, the better. That means you need to make sure your keywords are all there and multiple times if possible. Don't stuff the text with keywords; it still needs to be easy to read. After all, it's no good people finding you, if they can't then easily read your content.

Links are a critical component of the ranking of a site. The first step is to make sure that you have good internal links. There need to be links to your most important pages straight from your front page. The words in the link need to be relevant to the content (i.e. no 'click here' links). Where possible, the links need to contain your keywords. A good menu structure, like the one already included in your site does this for you.

External links add massively to your ranking. They're an indication that your site is relevant, interesting and to be trusted. The better the site that links to you, the more weight that link will carry. Try to find sites that might be willing to link to you. Maybe these are customers, networking sites or industry groups. You can of course list on a listing site as well. If you use any social media for professional purposes, think of linking from them too.

The final concept is the Google Page Rank. This is essentially Google's ranking of how good your site is. You can see this for yourself by downloading the Google tool bar. A high Google page rank won't mean that you appear high in a search for a particular search term (that's dependent on your key words), but it will mean that your site has a better chance of appearing higher than another site also using those keywords.

The final step is to look at your competitors' sites. Now you understand your own site, you can compare it to your competitors. This is vital. You don't need to have the best website in the world, but you do need a website that is better than most of your competitors if you want to appear high in the search rankings. Based on this assessment, you can now identify the areas you need to improve. For more details on how to implement these ideas, please contact us for the full guide.