Increasingly websites are the main port of call and source of information for customers and companies of all sectors. One of the current ‘buzz’ phrases concerned with getting more traffic to websites is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural or un-paid search result links. Effective SEO enables traffic to be driven to your website, but should not compromise the experience of your website. If your website isn’t an enjoyable experience users simply won’t return.

As with most marketing communications, content is king and great content will only help your search rankings to rise. Effective copywriting using keyword phrases will help aid the website to climb up through the google rankings but make them unnoticeable to the user.

Here are a few top tips to help you on your way to a better SEO strategy:

Content is key. Creating a site with a high level of organic traffic will only happen if you have great content. Visitors will only stay on your site and come back to it if there is relevant and engaging content which will stimulate the user.

There are a number of ways to engage with website users:

• Ensure that research on keyword phrases for your site has been undertaken and introduce these subtly into the copy throughout your site.

• Avoid keyword stuffing.  Keywords should amount to 4-5% of the content – don’t compromise the readability of the content.

• If your objective is to get better visibility in google then you need to understand the phrases that your audiences are looking for.

• Write relevant articles and posts that demonstrate your expertise.

• Provide website users with frequent news updates.

The architecture of your site. As well as your content, the structure of your site plays an important role into effective SEO, for example:

Minimise click throughs. The most important/relevant information should not be hidden away. If important information is more than four clicks away, it can’t be that important!

The H1 tag: A H1 tag is used to define the content of the page, most commonly headers and titles. Clear H1 tags are a must do on every page of your website. The purpose should always be to describe the main topic for the page but with only one per page to keep the content clear.

Title tag: The title tag is the title given to each image on a page. It is important because, like the H1 tag, it shows the search engine what the image is about. They are also crucial to helping visually impaired visitors using screen readers to understand what the image is about.

HTML: Core recommends that a website is always built in HTML format in the first instance; you can always have the option to upgrade to a flash version if required. Search engines cannot read flash sites and neither can visually impaired users. Flash sites enable animation effects and do have a place within the online community but they cannot be crawled by search engines and are therefore not compatible with an effective SEO strategy.

Text based content: Although a picture can paint a thousand words, it can’t help with effective SEO! The more text based articles on your website the better; this will give the search engine more key words to feed on.