Search Engine Listings
Appearing in search results is not an immediate process; in the first 6 months, the most work has to be done, on organic search to get a good position on google it takes six months to see how good a rank you can get. So if you want results (new customers) straight away , you will have to use paid for social media ads, or if there enough groups to join try that. The position you first appear in the organic search, is a bit unpredictable. It will improve as your website spends more time on the internet, good and relevant search engine work, will also improve your chances of being found.
The benefit of organic search is you don’t have to pay Google anything and people can still find you. It does depend on a number of things including code on the website and how relevant the website is to what you are selling.
There are three main ways of ranking higher in organic search which are through: code, content and backlinks. The following section explains this.
Title Tag
In html a tag is a block of code. Title tags contain what is seen on the search results like in the above picture the “Title” tag for Southsea Inks which are the words: Ink Toner stationery Computer Repairs Southsea in figure 1.
Description Tag
The description should go into more depth like: business type/name location and brief services. Or other words that will emphasise the keywords in the title tag. The description tag should go immediately after the title tag. It is what people read your website is about before clicking to go onto it.
The description tag for Southsea Inks contains the words:
“We Sell new and recycled Ink and Toner, stationery, Repair computers and Laptops and do mobile phone screen replacements. Student Discount of 10%.”
Content
Content is important Google uses automated reading of images of graphics to rank websites. The more relevant the business is to a customer looking for a product or wanting to know more about a product, then the higher it will rank. Recently it has become necessary for a website to be an authority on the products and services to rank well in organic search results.
Directories
Another means of improving your website listing on search engines is using directories. Directories store the details of different services much like yell.com and thompson.com. Some of the listings are free and some are paid for. If you pay some directories, they will call you up with customers that want to use your service, (they usually have a free trial period where you can get customers for free). If you have a free listing, you can usually include a link pointing to your website on it; having links pointing to your website increases your rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing, also customers that use the directory will come to you.
Back Links
Directories are good for creating links back to your website this is part of offsite SEO. Unfortunately if a company has 10 or more job adverts on in Indeed, and is listed in the same directories as you, then it will be very hard to compete with them.