Tips for Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation. SEO. You want to be on the first page, and preferably above the fold when people search for certain things. That’s the goal. We think you should hire us to achieve this but have included some basic tips below in case you don't...


You actually don’t need a degree in this to be an 'expert'. You just need patience, a good understanding how search engines work, and then some tips, from us, which we have found work well. This list is not exhaustive and is not giving away any great secrets, but should give you a good boost in the right direction.

Launching a Global Website

1. Have country specific sites for each domain you want. So for Irish markets, have a .ie domain, for uk, have .co.uk etc. If you don’t want to have multiple sites, then you can potentially buy the domain extensions and redirect to a subdirectory e.g. http://yourwebsite.com/uk

2. Fortunately Google supports using the rel=“canonical” link element across different domains. So you can have similar content on both your .ie and .co.uk extensions of your site, and use the link element to indicate the exact IR: of the domain preferred for linking. So duplicate content is not an issue!

3. Send website visitors to the right domain. Uses the country, IP, browser language, to auto detect to automatically redirect people to the right ‘local’ site.

4. Bing recognizes the language meta tag: , so include this in each of your ‘local’ website pages  section.

5. Make sure your website loads quickly; faster loading equals higher ranking. Local hosting also helps reduce page load speeds. That, plus excellent coding makes a big difference. We are excellent coders...

6. Add Google translate to your site, so your visitors can see your content in their language.

Keyword Research

7. Build a keyword list that is very specific to your business and the products or services you offer. The more specific you can be, the better your optimisation.

8. Do international keyword research: see what keywords are most popular in each country you’re targeting.

9. Use the right spelling variations, even for same language countries e.g. color vs. colour.

On-Page SEO Elements

10. Google and other search engines read the page title, so put keywords here. Keep the page title under 70 characters, with no more than four keywords per page title. The primary keyword should appear first, and each keyword phrase should be separated by pipes (|) And, each page title on you site should be unique.

11. Also put the keywords in the meta data.This not only give a compelling reason why someone should visit your page, it’s also read by the search engines.

12. Put keywords in your header text, which is usually the title of an article, and engines see this and put extra importance on words in the H1 text.

13, Put keywords in the page content.

14. Let visitors navigate to your other ‘local’ sites, linking all the versions of your site together.

15. Add a call to action (CTA) on every page, above the fold of the page. CTAs help SEO by creating an internal link on your website to a specific landing page.

Off-Page SEO Elements

16. Make amazing and unique content, which is valuable to your customers, stuff that people will want to link to.

17. Get inbound links. The number and quality of links to your website is quite important to Google and other search engines – the more the better.

18. Blogs are great. Build a list of niche blogs in your field, then start commenting on these blogs with insightful comments. After this, reach out to them and ask if you can write a guest post for them. If they accept, write new content, including links back to your site, anchoring your post with your keywords – sneaky, but effective!

19. ALWAYS avoid black-hat link building strategies. If you don’t know what that is, good. Stay that way.

20. Also, get involved in Social Media. Google actually uses Google+ content to optimise searches.