Back in 2007, SEO was Kuka’s main service. Yes, we built a lot of websites, and wrote a lot of copy, but other agencies outsourced their Search Engine Optimisation to us. We were that good, but back then it was so easy! Put it this way, we once had first position in the UK for ‘Cheap Flights’ for one client and ‘iPhone Repairs’ for another… yup. So it’s fair to say we know our way around optimising a website, but now we usually outsource the work to another agency (run by one of our old staff members, so we know our clients are in good hands!) so we can focus on the things we really love doing. It’s not a service everyone can afford though, so we provide as much help and support as we can to the microbusinesses we work with to help them to get where they want to be in the search engines. This is a snapshot of what we teach, and hopefully it will help someone out there who wants their website to perform better, but maybe doesn’t have the budget to outsource the work.

There are 4 key areas in SEO:

1. On-site SEO
2. Off-site SEO
3. Technical SEO
4. and Content

Here’s a quick rundown of what to look at in each.

On-site SEO

This is optimising the parts of your website that the search engines care about, making sure it’s accessible and easy to navigate. It includes:

• Page Descriptions & Meta Titles
• Page hierarchy (using headings properly)
• Linking (internal & external)
• URL Structure
• Image optimisation (size, names, alt tags etc.)

There are some great tools available to help you with this process.  If you use WordPress then Yoast SEO is the one we recommend.

Off-site SEO

In a nutshell, this is all about Link Building.  Lucky for you we’ve already written a guide to that which you can get here.

Technical SEO

This is the more involved part, and you may need your web developer’s support to improve how your website works in order to optimise it for the search engines.  Things to look at includes:

• How secure is your website?
• How quickly do pages load?
• Are there any errors?  E.g. 404 page not found
• Is your robots.txt set up properly so that the search engines can crawl your site?
• If your content is repeated in areas on your website (aka the dreaded duplicate content) are you using canonical tags to show search engines which one to index?

If any of that sounds terrifying, don’t panic (well, definitely don’t panic if we built your website, because we sort all of that out!). A good developer can sort any issues with your technical SEO very quickly.

Content

And last, but definitely not least, is content.  Your website needs good quality content all over it.  Things to consider with content include:

• Originality
• Keyword density
• Freshness
• Length
• Readability

And that’s about it!  If that’s terrifying, get in touch.  If we can’t help you we can certainly put you in touch with the good folks who can.  Good luck!