How many websites do you think are out there that underperform? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Answer… far too many! This is where I tell you about one of my hobbies: I like testing sites to see how they perform against their competitors. I know … I’m a bit sad and I need to get out more – but if you met anyone who knows me they’ll tell you that I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. Some people read, watch TV… I, err do stuff like this. 
Now, the problem is because so many websites fail to attract the right visitors they fail to sell the product or service that they were initially designed to do, so are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard! They sit there in ‘webspace’ like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens – waiting in cryo hoping to be found – basically doing absolutely nothing!
But it doesn’t have to be like that. If the website content is written from the perspective of the person who is looking for it rather than the company’s perspective then you have a visitor magnet…
If you analyse your website, the market space you’re in and your main competitors you’ll be able to tell whether your search engine rankings can be improved. And I put a Cadbury’s Cream Egg on it that they can 
If you use organic SEO (search engine optimisation), which involves two different techniques – on-page and off-page – then you’ll find that your site will naturally rise up the search engine rankings.
On-page SEO
This involves optimising the ‘on-page elements’ of a website such as:
- URLs
- Page Titles
- Keywords
- Descriptions
- Headline tags
- Content
- Hyperlink text
Off-page SEO
This involves link building i.e. the number of back links or links back to the website from other ‘relevant’ websites. The higher your link popularity, the higher your page rank (PR) will be and the higher your site will appear in the search engine results.
From an On-Page SEO perspective, websites and their content that are developed from a user perspective (using Organic SEO techniques) are favoured by the search engines like Google because they match what people are searching for and are given a higher priority – as they are seen as being created naturally (not tested on animals).
So for the next 7 days I’m going to review each of the seven areas of On-Page search engine optimisation so you can see what you need to do. Now, it might be that you don’t have the time to personally undertake your own SEO – but then you can use this as a guide to what needs to be done before you contact an SEO specialist (and that wasn’t meant to be a hint…)
So, see you tomorrow for the 2nd part of ‘SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website – part 2′ …
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