SEO is a vital part of any web project. While it’s often thought of as an optional extra or something that’s not even mentioned during the development of a new site, the reality is that in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace a website is unlikely to succeed at all without a well-planned SEO campaign. The vast majority of any websites visitors arrive via search engines such as Google or Yahoo and unless your site can be found on these it is going to be failing in its job of driving customers or clients to your business. If a new website is launched without any basic SEO it will simply flounder and stagnate unless there is a considerable marketing or advertising spend to help it.

Basic changes to the sites structure gave a 300% increase in visitors to the site in 3 weeks.

So what is SEO?

In essence SEO is making your website easy for a search engine to understand, so that it can be shown under the right search queries and making your site appear to be bigger and more popular than it really is.

SEO can be broadly split into onsite and offsite activities.

Onsite SEO activities focus on the structure and content of a website to help search engines determine what a site is about and includes:

Top Ten Onsite SEO requirements

• Content – making sure the content is well structured, keyword rich and clearly written.
• Site structure – the actual way the site has been built, are the pages named correctly? Are pictures too big or badly named?
• Are the URLs (the actual address of each page) search engine friendly?
• Does it load quickly?
• Does it comply with the best practise guidelines for accessibility?
• Does it use technologies such as Flash that could prevent search engines and some users from seeing it the way it was intended?
• Does it display correctly on mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones?
• Does your site have a functioning site map?
• Making sure Page Titles are accurate and different on every page.
• Check your site doesn’t have any broken links - no one likes a dead end!

These are just a few of the very basics of SEO that your site needs to comply with to even stand a chance of competing online.

Tandem Solutions ensure that all our clients’ websites that we develop comply with these SEO guidelines; however we can work on any website and improve the performance of your site to generate a real ROI.

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