You Need to Optimise Your Website

I was with a customer today who told me that many business owners he knew were telling him that he must get his website optimised. Each time he is asked this question he in turn asks them what they understand is meant by optimisation. Not one of them knows but despite this lack of knowledge, they still emphatically tell him he must optimise his website.

Search Engine Optimisation is a very general term that covers a whole plethora of subjects and things you can do to help your website appear higher up in the search engines. Today I want to talk about one of these methods; how to spy on your competitors.

Check Out the Competition

In any walk of life, it is very hard to think of something truly original. Perhaps one day you will but meanwhile, your best bet is to copy what already works. So if you want to get onto page 1 of Google, what better place to start than with the websites that are already there?

Type in your desired search phrase into Google and look at the top result. Now take a note of the domain name, ignoring the "http://" at the beginning and also ignoring the page name at the end after .com or .co.uk. Let us say for the sake of illustration that the name of the website is webdesignnottingham.com. Go into Google and type this in the search bar:

info:webdesignnottingham.com

There are three links on this page that are of interest. Firstly, it says "Find pages that link to this website". Clicking on here shows you pages that link back to this website and are considered as high quality by Google. Maybe some of these websites will link back to you too. It is worth going through this list and seeing which ones you can persuade to link back to you.

Next it says "Find pages from the site". This will show you all pages that Google has in its index for the chosen website. How many pages do they have? How many pages does your website have? To stand a chance in this race, you will have to make sure that your website has more pages than theirs. Not any old pages though. You must make sure they are full of high quality content.

Thirdly it says "Find pages that contain the term". This is similar to the links list but these links are looked upon as less important. But if you have been through all the links above, try some websites from this list and see if they will also link back to you.

Beat the Competition

Doing this alone will not ensure that you get ahead of the competition but it will put you on the right road and send your website in the right direction. Continue this exercise with all the other websites on page 1 and before long, you should see an improvement in the numbers of visitors you get from Google.