West5web website design London

Website health checks ...

So how healthy is your existing website and what exactly do we mean by "healthy"?

Well, imagine this scenario. You've launched your business, paid a fortune to have an all singing, all dancing website created for you and you sit back waiting for enquiries to flood in. Nothing happens, so you wait a bit longer and still no enquiries. But you've got this great website so where are your customers?

Well, just because you have a wonderful website, it doesn't follow that anyone will actually be looking at it. So why is this. For a start there are millions and millions of websites these days, all competing for potential client's attention. For example if you do a search in Google for "hairdressers" you get a staggering 4,970,000 results. Its hard to believe I Know. If however, you do a search for "hairdressers ealing" you get a mere 35,000 results, still alot but much, much less.

Another major reason is that often when websites are built, little or no thought goes into preparing the site so that it shows up well in search engines such as Google. Much of this has to do with "keywords" within the content of your site, attached to any images and within the meta tags of your site. [Meta tags describe the title, content and nature of your site and are read by search engines and which in part determine how highly ranked your site will be]. An example of a keyword or phrase might be "hairdressers ealing" or "hair w5" so these keywords need to show up as much as possible on your site. If you used the keyword "hairdressers" we have already seen that you will be competing with many more sites and the chance of your site appearing high up in the search engine listings is very low to nil.

Other considerations for an "unhealthy" website might be that it does not display properly in all browsers because it is not constructed correctly to begin with. In addition, your site may have few or no links to it from other sites, which is another way that search engines determine the popularity of your site.

So this all sounds a bit worrying doesn't it. Well don't worry, because west5web is here to apply some first aid to your website and help it achieve a higher ranking in search engines and ultimately gain more visitors to your site. Here are some of the things we can do:

01.Ensure your site is search engine optimised:

• check the website coding to make sure the site is constructed correctly
• choose suitable keywords and phrases for your website
• ensure the content of you pages is rich in these keywords and phrases
• optimise your web page title, your description and keyword tags
• optimise your web image "alt tags" - these are descriptive phrases that are applied to images and serve as an "alternative" text for the blind or partially sighted
• submit or resubmit your wesbite pages to all the major search engines
• remove any "tricks" that may be on your web site that try to fool search engines into ranking sites more highy. An example of this might be incorporating lots of keywords onto a page using a font the same colour as the background of your page. Search engines are aware of these tricks and will penalise you if found.

02.Link Campaigns:
One of the key factors in determining the popularity of your website and the resulting number of visitors to it, is the number of links from other websites pointing to yours. The more quality links there are to your website from other websites, the higher your site will appear in the search engines. West5web can find and create quality incoming links for you. This also has the added advantage that you effectively build a "resource" library of useful links to other sites for your customers.

03.Paid Advertising:
If you have a healthy marketing budget, west5web can search out the best way to advertise your product or services on the internet via pay-per-click advertising. This can be a very effective way of advertising but can be expensive so is not for everyone.

So don't panic. Although the measures listed above are medium to long term strategies and there is no guarantee of how much additional traffic they will bring to your site, there is plenty that can be done to bring your website back to life and drive additional trsffic and customers to your website.

Don't forget, west5web is here to make you life easy !!
So why not get in touch today and see how we can help you.