Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Effective SEO gets the right site visitors to your website.

SEO is not enough on its own. Your ultimate goal is sales, not site visitors. The essential second objective of SEO is to trigger the right response from site users Keep both objectives in mind as you set up or edit your webpages.

SEO needn't be about spending up big. Good writing, an ability to put yourself in your customer's shoes and attention to detail are often enough. It depends on:

• how competitive your industry is online;
• how well your website's software is structured;
• whether you aim at a local, national or international market.

Search engine friendly?

There are well established practices that help a website to rank well in SERPs. We cover some of them here. Your competitors know about good SEO. So even after you attain those high rankings on page 1, expect to work to maintain it.

You're ahead of the pack if you have a Bizazz website. Structurally, our sites tick search engines' boxes & tend to rank high in online searches.

Google publicises some of the principles that they use to rank webpages. Here are some insights from Google:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications....When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results....

You should build a website to benefit your users, and any optimization should be geared toward making the user experience better.

Key points:

• Write for your site users, not some imaginary search robot.
• Use the SEO tools that Bizazz offers.
• Update your webpage content often.
• Check results (website statistics, sales, customer feedback).

SEO & webpage structure

When you edit your site using our content management system (cms), Bizazz uses code features that search engines value.

Use your site's custom heading styles (h1, h2,...) for main topics. The higher level the heading has (h1 is top), the bigger the weighting that search engines give to its words. Include important search terms (keywords or key phrases) in these headings.

Create page titles and menu names that include keywords. Write a relevant, unique metadescription for each webpage that your customers/target market is most interested in. Stay within recommended lengths:

• metadescriptions: <150-160 characters including spaces;
• webpage titles: aim at no more than 60-65 characters including spaces.

Webpage content

Keep content on topic - relevant to your page title and headings. Communicate naturally, human to human. Don't resort to tricks such as keyword stuffing; even if you fool a search engine, you'll repel potential customers.

What about using professional content writers or AI-generated content? It's up to you to decide, but take some precautions. If you engage a content writer: ensure they have the necessary knowledge & clear directions about your target market & its needs. Read their draft articles before you publish them.

If you try AI, be wary of copyright infringement:

• by you, in using the chatbot's responses for commercial purposes without acknowledgment of the chatbot's owner or the original sources of its information
• by the chat software.

Try to humanise that AI 'English'. Replacing a few overused keywords by pronouns would be a good start!

Here at Bizazz, we do a lot of research online. We read articles every day riddled with bad grammar & clumsy sentences. Poor written English is a fast putoff. Worse, there's a disturbing amount of repeated (scraped) content across different websites, and articles that are shallow, irrelevant or plain waffle. Then there's the online advice that is only partly true or is 100% wrong. Much of this is found in website postings by content writers who know less than they think they do. That's only the rubbish that we've identified within our area of expertise; we suspect the same problems arise to some degree in other fields too.

Don't measure success by the number of visits to a webpage. If those site visitors weren't possible customers, or if they went away convinced that your business is inept & ignorant, you've lost.

• Imagery

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  Use relevant, high quality photos. Add titles and alt(ernate) text with useful keywords/key phrases.

  • Search engines take notice of photo titles and alt text.
  • These create more routes to your website. People find your site whenever they search for photos of bedknobs, broomsticks or whatever it is that you sell.

  Videos are best uploaded to a major site such as Youtube, Rumble or Bitchute with a link back to your website and links on your webpages to each video.

  • Your website will be quicker to load if it is not weighed down with video files.
  • Searching for topon these video sites is another way for people to connect to your website.

• Intellectual property

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  Honour copyright. As well as the legal & moral aspect of intellectual property rights, search engines care about IP. They can penalise copycat websites severely.

  Mistakes, misplaced trust in your sources and misunderstandings about copyright and 'fair use' can happen. It is usually fair to summarise or quote briefly from another webpage, acknowledging the source by a link.

  • Don't filch great text content from other websites. Note: search engines make allowance for product data from manufacturers.
  • Don't trust AI content when it comes to copyright. This is a contentious and untested area of law. An AI bot is essentially an online plagiarism tool. A few do list their sources; but does the bot have permission to re-use that material? Do you as the AI user? Who owns copyright to the AI response itself?
  • Build on others' good information that you quote online, by adding examples and comments of your own.
  • If you use any photos that aren't yours, get permission from the owner. Check copyright provisions on stock photos when you download them. Some are for non commercial use, or only for restricted commercial use unless you pay a fee.
  • Check out the Australian Copyright Council 's website for information on copyright online (fact sheets, print book and ebook format).

  For the website owner's protection and ours, we may suspend a website that we host if it breaches copyright.

• Links

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  links to other webpages, use link titles with relevant keywords. Don't use an ampersand (&) in the link title. Special characters can break the link.

  Check the links on your site from time to time via a free broken link checker. Broken links drag down search engine rankings. External links: the other websites might move or delete pages. For links within your own site: you might delete or suspend a page and forget to remove links to it from other pages.

• Words (and pictures) of wisdom

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  Update webpages with interesting, relevant, original content. Give site visitors a reason to come back. They'll start to trust your knowledge and experience. Give search engines recent content.

  Well written webpages that offer explanations, how-to's and historical background all give your site an SEO boost. You build your website's search engine reputation as you build an online library of expert comment and advice. Both a website and a webpage author can earn search engine credit for trustworthy, useful content, especially if other sites link to their webpages.

  • Put your name and credentials on information pages that you write. Contact us for assistance, so that search engines respond to it as 'page author' data.
  • Bizazz blog software will automatically generate a search-engine-friendly author panel.

  You can find out more here about SEO and 'Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness' (E-A-T).

From SERP to website

A seriously cashed-up buyer has searched online, and one of your webpages has appeared on page 1 of their SERP. How do you entice this keen customer to visit your page rather than the others listed above and below it? Your webpage title is followed immediately by a metadescription. What's written there can draw people to your website or put them off.

Edit metadescriptions (aka Google descriptions) in Bizazz. Make sure the page title and description fit together well: informative, to the point, not repetitive. Together they draw the reader to think,'That webpage is where I'll find what I want.' Be creative; perhaps a short punchy metadescription will work wonders.

Don't ever change the webpage's filename aka page title, unless the webpage content has changed drastically. It's vital for search engine indexing.

Search engines sometimes replace metadescriptions in SERPs with a description of their own devising. They do this in response to the particular search phrase used. You can't stop this altogether. To minimise it: keep your description directly related to the main topic of the webpage.

In an online world that depends on creating trust in an invisible entity: a business account with Google (Google Workspace) helps you stand out as a credible business. When your webpages appear in search results, your Google listing can show up there too. Include an attractive relevant photo, opening hours, website link and contact details. There's no real reason why having a Google Workspace account should build people's trust; your business hasn't been verified by Google. But it looks good to web users. Also, Google probably pitches its search algorithms to favour websites that have an account with them. This all requires you to place some trust in Google, which will hold certain data about your business. At Bizazz, we don't trust Mr Google so we are not going to follow our own advice and get a Google Workspace account, unless we really have to for the health of our online search results.

Google is the best known but not the only search engine. Duckduckgo & others are gaining popularity. If you aren't no 1 on Google, check out what DDG, Bing etc think. They might surprise you.

Be visitor friendly

Now that you have your potential customer where you want them... What information do your customers want most? Place it high up on the page; eg phone users might not look past the first scrolldown.

Your website needs to lead the site visitor simply to the right decision for their needs. That doesn't mean throwing a clumsy noose around their neck. On one webpage I visited, three different 'Click here! Join us!' flyouts jumped across the text while I was reading. How annoying! I need what this website has; but I'll look for it elsewhere.

Not every website visitor will become an instant customer. Even if you can't help them this time, give them a good site experience. They might bookmark your site for later on, or remember how well-informed & easy it was to use. They will certainly recall a bad experience!

• How does each webpage appear at first sight? Inviting, overwhelming? Do blocks of information or graphics compete for attention? On a phone, long paragraphs look terrible and are hard to read.
• Deliver what the webpage promised in the SERP. Otherwise your visitor will leave annoyed; you wasted their time.
• Does the menu help your customers? It can take a few tries to get this right. You can easily change menu names and re-arrange menus using Bizazz.
• Alternate text for images helps visually impaired web users to access your website. Your photos' alt text should be informative and sound natural when read aloud.

For more info: visit our SEO page.