Monday 24 August 2009

I have a beautiful website, why am I not getting any traffic? (SEO and its uses)

Imagine a person who is standing in the middle of the room. His eyes are closed. The room is full of people. His job is to identify who each of those people are. Because his eyes are closed, he can only identify them by what they say and how loud they are say it. It also helps if they speak the language that he understands and if they are not being rude to him. Once he identifies the people, he starts helping them.

This person is Google. The people around “him” are the websites. If they make the right noises, speak clearly, use the right language and do not offend – Google brings up their ranking and puts them at the top. Because Google is the only one making the rules – you need to play by them in order to be helped.

Google “listens” to each website (old or new) and ranks them, depending on how many of its rules they follow. The highest rank is 10. The lowest – 0. Achieving the highest rank means that you follow exactly what Google tells you to do and in turn it recognises and respects your website. For example Twitter has a rank of 9. If your rank is 0, that means that Google cannot hear you at all. You can check your ranking here:

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php (just put the URL in and click “check PR”). This website is very safe.

SEO is used to give the websites and blogs a “voice” that Google would like to hear and will understand. SEO experts know most of the rules (Google changes them quite often – so we monitor them carefully) and therefore know what to do.

Using the correct keywords is one of the rules. There is a ratio that you need to use in order for Google to start moving you up to the top pages. Those words are not necessarily the product that you are trying to sell (if your product is unique, people looking for it are very likely to be among your customers already). Identifying the keywords relevant for your business can be a challenge. Virtual Blue Bird can help you out by putting together a comprehensive list of the right keywords for your website.

Similarly, Google will also check out your pictures … are they labelled correctly? Another problem faced by many of our clients is that putting a hyperlink into an article does not necessarily mean that you will get traffic. Why? Simply because the hyperlink needs to be entered correctly.

There is also a large number of rules that relate to the blog posts, ratios, competitions, use of diagrams/pictures, videos, social media etc. that our experts are able to help you with.

If your traffic is low, give us a call and we will be happy to have a look at your website and see if there are any issues that can easily be solved by Search Engine Optimisation.

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