Nettl of Stockport is now SEO Certified
We’re pleased to announce that Nettl of Stockport is now an SEO Certified Nettl store.
What this means is we now have access to advanced SEO services available through the Nettl.com network. Nettl of Stockport is now perfectly placed to help our clients’ websites reach their full potential.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the process of optimising a website so that it appears in more search results, helping customers find the most relevant providers of the products and services they need.
When people search for something in Google or Microsoft’s Bing, the search engine looks in it’s index of websites and pulls out the highest quality, most relevant web pages it can find and displays these in the results. Clearly, the sites at the top of the search results will get more click than those further down the list on page 2 or lower.
There are three aspects to Search Engine Optimisation (Google is by far the most popular search engine, and so we refer to Google below. But the same principles apply to other search engines like Bing too):
1. Google needs to be able to read your website
Once Google know’s your website exists, it will send Googlebot, their crawler (sometimes called a spider) to your website to see what it can find. Googlebot is automated, and is looking for keywords on each web page it crawls to add to it’s index, ready to serve up when someone makes a matching search.
In order for Googlebot to do it’s job, it needs to be able to read the website. But Googlebot doesn’t see the website in the same way humans do. It can’t read pictures, and images, and it has to make assumptions about which pieces of information are more important than others.
For this reason, web pages need to be structured in a specific way to make it as visible to Google as possible. This is down to your web designer. At Nettl of Stockport, we build our websites with Search Engines in mind from the outset.
2. Google will display the most relevant results it can find.
When you search for anything, Google will look through it’s index and find the most relevant results it can find. This in essence means it’s looking for matching keywords on a web page to the keywords that have been searched for. Of course this is an gross oversimplification. You can’t just stuff your web page with lots of the same or similar keywords, and hope to appear at the top of search results. In fact doing so can actually harm your websites rankings. Googlebot is pretty intelligent these days, and it can sniff out pages that have been designed to try to get around it’s algorithm.
What Google is looking for is to answer questions as best it can. And it’t pretty sophisticated in how it assesses relevance, and the ‘rules’ are being tweaked all the time.
Making sure your web page is relevant is key to SEO. We call this on-page SEO.
3. Google will display the most trusted website it can find.
Trust is very important to Google, and other search engines. If the results can’t be trusted then Google’s business is doomed to failure! The more trust a site has, the higher it’s authority.
There are many factors that Google takes into account when working out how trustworthy a website is – and we mean this in a very broad sense. The speed of a website, how it performs on a mobile as well as a desktop, how secure it is, where on the globe the website is in relation to the searcher and how many external websites link to a website are all important factors in assessing the authority of a website.
Increasing the authority of a website is called off-page SEO.
SEO from Nettl of Stockport
At Nettl of Stockport, we understand what’s involved with increasing a website’s rank in search engine results. Let’s be upfront about this – it’s not a quick fix. SEO is a long term commitment – it can take weeks and months before you see the impact flowing through to your business.
But rest assured your customers are looking for your business and if they are not finding you they are finding your competitors. Nettl of Stockport can help you maximise the potential of your website.
