{"id":2895,"date":"2013-05-20T05:31:10","date_gmt":"2013-05-20T05:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.e-cbd.com.au\/blog\/?p=2895"},"modified":"2019-05-02T03:09:01","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T03:09:01","slug":"optimise-your-website-like-a-pro-part-1-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.e-cbd.com.au\/blog\/seo\/optimise-your-website-like-a-pro-part-1-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimise Your Website Like a Pro – Part 1 of 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

e-CBD presented at the Business Women\u2019s Incorporated luncheon in April (a 3×5 step digital workout<\/a>), and as promised here’s Part 1 of my presentation on Search Engine Optimisation (Part 2 is here<\/a>, Part 3 coming soon!). You can view the presentation in slide form<\/a> on Slide Share, as well as Luke and Nick\u2019s presentations on Social Media Marketing and Facebook Pages respectively.<\/p>\n

To give you a quick overview, this post will be going into the basics of what Search Engine Optimisation is (in 2013) and how Google ranks websites, followed by quick look into technical optimisation and what your website needs before starting with the main SEO activities (technical optimisation is a main SEO activity too, the only difference is that you’re considering optimisation before the site is actually built).<\/p>\n

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Parts 2 & 3 will delve into what the main SEO activities are in detail with advice on what you can do yourself to help your website rank better.<\/p>\n

What is SEO?<\/h2>\n

To start with, Search Engine Optimisation<\/a> (SEO) is the process of enhancing and adjusting a website in order to make it more visible in search engines for relevant search queries or keywords. The techniques used to optimise a website will be outlined in Parts 2 and 3. There are over 200 signals Google uses to determine the rankings of websites in search results, including on-page factors such as content, headings and titles, as well as technical and off-page elements such as your robots.txt file and online citations or “links”.<\/p>\n

Rather than implementing quick “SEO tricks” which try to manipulate search results (and only has short term benefits and can hurt your site\u2019s rankings in the long run), or focusing on #1 rankings for trophy keywords, SEO is the process of making your site valuable to your website visitors and thus becoming the best answer to their initial search query. SEO falls under the umbrella of internet marketing and all of your internet marketing efforts needs to be firmly tied to precise goals for the website traffic you are trying to generate i.e. I want to bring 250 people per day to my site to increase enquiries about my blue widget services.<\/p>\n

Technical Optimisation \u2013 Pre-SEO<\/h3>\n

First and foremost, it\u2019s important to make sure your website has been built correctly to start with. If you are thinking of getting a new website, or have had a new website made, make sure the following factors are considered with your decision otherwise you could lose any SEO value your site has or not be able to optimise your site properly at all. Things to look at include:<\/p>\n

What type of Content Management System (CMS) is\/will the site be built in?<\/h4>\n