You have a website, and it looks good, but are you getting traffic and sales?

The reality is that while you may have an attractive website, it may not be optimized for the search engines or for your visitors. This can result in your site placing poorly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and not converting visitors to customers. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

An optimized site achieves the following:

• Relevance: Search engines (Google for example) want to know that when someone clicks on a link they will find what they expected to find. This means that Google rewards websites where the title, description, keywords and content match up as closely as possible. Do this well, and Google will reward your site with a higher ranking.
• Friendly Site Architecture: Search engine robots crawl your site to index the content and determine what it is about. Make your site easy for them to navigate and it will benefit you.
• Content: Quality content on your site attracts and keeps visitors and ensures that the search engines treat your site with more respect.
• Engagement: The more engaging you can make your site, the longer your visitors will stay on it and the more you will be rewarded by the search engines with a good ranking. Additions such as audio and video are an excellent way to provide engagement to visitors.
• Backlinks: The amount of links (backlinks) your site gets from other sites is an important quality measure that search engines use to evaluate your site. If lots of quality sites are linking to you, it is probably an indication that you are a quality site also – one that people will want to visit. Google will reward your site accordingly. All else being equal, the site with more backlinks will outperform its competition. Generating backlinks to a site is an important part of ‘off-page’ SEO.

An SEO specialist will optimize your site so that it can perform its best. The following is a basic SEO package from Your Victoria:

1. Basic keyword research to determine ‘traffic keywords’ that could be incorporated into your website copy and meta tags to boost buying traffic to your site.

2. Check that each page of your website has appropriate title and description meta tags (what the search engines see in your site’s coding) to ensure the search engines and potential customers know what you are ‘about’, and rewrite or add if necessary.

3. Check that your Home page title and any sub-title match up as closely as possible with your title and description meta tags and rewrite if necessary. Attention to this step can result in a significant boost in search engine ranking.

4. Check that your Home page copy is SEO friendly. This means that it is directed at your visitor, includes your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) if possible, and includes your keywords to attract the search engines. We will write copy as required.

5. Check that your internal link structure is ‘robot’ friendly and if appropriate set up internal links from your Home page copy to your important inner pages. Search engine ‘bots’ like this as these links are easy to follow. This step will also focus more attention (‘link juice’) on your inner pages and will often help them to rank better.

6. Ensure that your domain name does not have a ‘canonical’ issue and fix if it does. This happens when two different URL’s lead to your site – a www URL and non-www URL. This can result in search engine confusion, and duplicate content issues which can damage your search engine ranking. For example, type your website domain name in the URL field in your browser without the ‘www’. When your site comes up, look in the URL field. If the URL does not have www but only http in front of your domain name, you may have an issue.

7. Add testimonials to your website. These are more powerful than anything you could say about your own products or services and will help your visitors to feel more comfortable about dealing with you. You will of course need to provide the testimonials.

8. Help you to optimize your Google Local Listing to improve your chances of getting a placement. Have you claimed your Google Local Listing? You will see the listing close to the top of Google page 1 if you do a search for a local business, for example, ‘furniture Victoria’. If you cannot find your business in the Local Listing for your main keyword and location, work needs to be done.

9. Install Google Analytics as appropriate. Without testing, you will not know what is and isn’t working and what can be improved on your site. Google Analytics is a free program that can be installed on your site. It collects data and summarizes it into a useful format for you to review.

Other services:

• Lead capture system: A lead capture system (autoresponder) is a method to gain your visitors' email addresses and enter them on a data system for follow-up. An automated capture system can be programmed to do regular mail-outs such as newsletters, special notices and sales events. This is an excellent way to turn prospects into clients.
• Video production: Video is a powerful tool to get your message across. In addition, Google loves video and you may find that your video shows up on page 1 of Google. A link to your website is imbedded in the video which can lead people who watch it to visit your site.
• Video Publishing: Publish your video on the web to numerous distribution services like YouTube. This will generate backlinks to your site and increased exposure to prospective customers.
• Backlink service: Getting quality backlinks to your site is never a wasted effort. Of course you can get backlinks if you have the time and know-how. If not, we highly recommend our backlink service.

The work that we do pays for itself. If your business is like most businesses, we can think of nothing more important than spending money on optimizing your website. It truly is an expenditure that can bring significantly greater and ongoing financial rewards.

For more information, please
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call 250-220-1721.

Disclaimer
None of the above services can guarantee a Google page 1 ranking, or any specific placement but they will help. Depending on the competition your website faces on the internet, more work may be needed to capture a top ranking (for example, article writing and distribution, press releases, and more aggressive link building).