Here at East Coast Design Studio, we are passionate about results. Yes, we love beautiful design and it’s always a focus in our work however it’s the analytics and results behind that design that really drives what we do, especially when it comes to websites. Basically, we aim to get you great results with thoughtful design. All of our websites are built in house and SEO focused to perform as best possible for you once built. If you want to know where to start or want to know why you should, keep reading…

SEO in simple terms is a process used to increase your websites visibility in relevant search results on a search engine like Google. The higher your website ranks for a search term, the more likely you are to have higher traffic to your website and in turn more customers. The difference between being on page 7 and page 1 can be essential to your business so it's definitely worth investing the time. You will first need to identify what your key search terms are before you can optimise your website, think about what someone might Google if they wanted to find your business.

There are a whole host of factors which search engines trawl through on your website to determine where it will rank in a search result. Today we are going to share the very basics of setting your website up to be SEO friendly to make sure you are ranking as high as possible for all the search terms your audience will be Googling. Before we get started, the biggest tip we can give you is that working on SEO is a long distance race, not a sprint - it takes time to put in place, to see the results and needs regular housekeeping too so don't feel disheartened if you don't see instant results overnight.

If there is only one thing you do for your website, it should be to set up Google Analytics. It’s free to use and tells you so much information about the performance of your site. Without it, it’s very difficult to measure just show much or how little success your website is having. You can measure so many factors including how many visitors you have to your site, how long they spend on each page, which pages get the most traffic and where these visitors are located in the world. Just extracting the basic information from Google Analytics can tell you so much about how your visitors view and use your website.

To help you appear in search results for certain terms you’ll need to make sure you’re using key search terms within your website content. However, getting the right balance of keywords in your content is really important, there is a fine line between regularly using key terms in your text and falling down the trap of ‘keyword stuffing’. The terms need to appear naturally within your text and to be sure you aren’t over doing it you can check your keyword density by working out how many times the terms appear on average per 100 words. If you go above 3% this could actually damage your ranking in searches rather than help as the content can be viewed as spam by the search engine when scanning your site.

TOP TIP: You can use online tools to work out your keyword density for you as a time saver!

If you haven’t yet optimised your meta descriptions and title tags -make sure you do. These two elements work together to help boost your organic ranking in search terms and hopefully entice your audience to click on to your site too.

Meta descriptions are a small piece of descriptive text which you’ll find below the page title in search result page. Try to include key terms in this text however bear in mind you do only have 160 characters to work with in this area so keep it short and snappy. Title tags are the title lines which show up in a search result to tell the user what the main topic of that page is. For your title tag you only have 65 characters to work with, so again keep it snappy and try to include your main key term in this line.

And that is our top three SEO essentials for beginners. There is so much more we could talk about on this topic, the list of factors which affects SEO is endless, but if you do want to know more, get in touch to find out how we can help you to optimise your website. And don’t forget we are still offering our free website audit which includes an a list of actionable points you can put in place right now to get your website working harder for you!