websiteprojects.com / Services / SEO

Search Engine Optimisation, often referred to simply as SEO, is the process of actively working to influence the placement of your website in the results search engines return for specific search terms. For instance, if you own a party and event planning business, say, www.partyplanning.com, you might decide you want to appear in the top ten results for the search phrase “party planning”. We’ll get a little more in-depth on selecting keyword phrases in a minute.

Generally, when people talk about offering SEO services or working to optimise a website, the types of activities they’ll perform break down into two broad areas – “on page” or “on site” optimisation and “off page” or “off site” optimisation.

On page SEO refers to all the factors a website owner has direct control over. The content, composition, style and the layout of the site, and any changes that are made to them, are part of on page SEO. Other components of an on page SEO strategy include things like sitemaps, robots.txt files, internal linking and so on. Again, these are defined as “on page” because they’re all factors the web site owner has direct control over.

Off page SEO refers to search engine optimisation activities and techniques that take place outside of the site itself. The most common off page SEO activity is called “link building.” Basically, this is the process of intentionally and methodically building links that point back to your site. Search engines view these links as ‘votes’ for your website from the linking site. When conducting a link building campaign, there are many things to consider, including the topic/content of the link hosting site, its PageRank, how many other outgoing links the page has, and the link anchor text (this is the actual word or phrase that one clicks on).

SEO, both on page and off, are ongoing processes – not one-time activities. Search engines are constantly crawling the web and updating their indexes to reflect new content and changes to existing sites. Furthermore, your competitors are continually making updates to their sites and working to increase their number of relevant back-links. Frequently updating the content on your site and continuously engaging in off page SEO activities are the best way to ensure that your site is well ranked for specific keywords.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?

Pay Per Click advertising, often referred to simply as “PPC”, is the practice of advertising on search engines and content pages, with the cost determined by the number of times an ad is clicked on. The most well known PPC service is Google’s AdWords. With these services, your ads will appear when they match search terms entered by users on Google or keywords on content pages. The ads display the text or image you’ve selected and link back to the page you’ve selected. PPC advertising allows you to track impressions (the number of time users have seen your ad), click thrus (the number of times users have clicked on your ad), the click thru rate, the average cost per click, and so on. By integrating PPC with onsite metrics, you can then track conversions and determine the cost per conversion as well.