Well, I’ve spent an extraordinarily long time reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques to help get my website up high in the search engine rankings, and I’ll be honest, most of it might as well have been written in Chinese! I have taken on board some of the information I’ve read and have added a SEO plugin to my website to help guide me through, but I’ll be honest, it’s really hard work! I’ve worked with the Google webmaster tools and have increased the responsiveness of my site (well, two actually, unashamed plug for Steelrat’s Personal Webserver :-)), and the Bing webmaster tools, and I’m finally seeing some results.
My campaign is for CCTV installations in and around Kent (the closer to Dover the better!) but there’s already a lot of competition out there. I’ve read articles which tell me that I really need to be creating articles with a minimum of 900 words to engage people’s attention <- that's word 162 apparently, see how hard this is! In the next article it advises keeping articles short and to the point... oh! I should create a meta description of 156 characters (really?!) and, well, there's a whole host of other stuff. But I also have to be careful not to overstep the mark by repeating key words and phrases too many times. Anyway, I notice that if I type in 'CCTV installers in Dover' in to Google's search bar now, I appear on page 8 (at the time of writing), which I think is not too shabby given the amount of time I've spent working on it. On Bing and Yahoo searches I fair a little better, I'm on page 3 - ooh err! I've decided it's too hard trying to meet everyone's idea of the best approach to SEO, I've taken on board some tips and tricks on the way, but I think I'll stick to writing articles when I have something to say. I think, at the end of the day, that 'word of mouth' is really the best policy. If people like my site then I'm sure they'll pass on the word. If I spend all my time learning SEO when will I have time to do my work?!
