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[00:00:00]  Saul: Hi everybody and welcome to the web design brisbane podcast. This is episode number four. Today's episode is entitled Website Optimization Brisbane. My name is Saul Edmonds, and as usual, I'm joined by the lovely Gillian Smith. 

[00:00:15]  Gillian: Morning. How are you today?

[00:00:17]  Saul: I'm great. How are you? That's good. We are the co-founders and creative directors are fantastic creative agency, a local business with a passion for helping our clients grow. We service clients in Brisbane, Australia wide and around the world growing their revenue with strategic website design. Over to you do.

[00:00:33]  Gillian: Okay, well, today, we will talk about website optimization, simple ways that you can optimize your website for the search engines. Increased optimization means more traffic and more traffic means more leads.

[00:00:46]  Saul:  Yep, sure does.

[00:00:48] Gillian: Our goal here is to help small business owners’ start-ups and entrepreneurs in the city of Brisbane, Australia, take the opportunity to the next level with great website design. If you're from another location, or city, welcome. Thanks for joining us today and we hope we can be of service and helping you grow your business in the online space.

[00:01:04]  Saul: Yeah, welcome everybody.

[00:01:06]  Gillian: Firstly, there are two types of website optimization. There's on page optimization and off page optimization. We'll be looking at both types of these today, with a special focus on page SEO, and with a list of the key things that you need to do to optimize your website for Google. Remember, SEO or search engine optimization is still always about the customer. With all website optimization strategies, you need to put your customer at the heart and evil, even Google wants your customers to be happy, and that being said, let's get started. 

[00:01:38] Saul: Yeah, that's right. 

[00:01:39]  Gillian: So, what is on page SEO or on page optimization?

[00:01:43]  Saul:  You tell, Gil? 

[00:01:43]  Gillian: Well, on page website optimization makes the most of your website for the search engines. keywords, that's your preferred set of keywords for your business provides a foundation for on page SEO strategies with regards to on page optimization, uses the following elements strategically to boost your performance in search engines. These elements include your page URL, and the meta titles in the headlines such as your h1 tags, h2, h3, etc, those tags in any image tags, and of course, the meta description, which is behind the scenes on your page. And just remember, on page website optimization is not just for your homepage, it's for all your website pages.

[00:02:26]  Saul: Yeah. So instead of saying that to that whole bunch of criteria, which I guess most people will go, I have no idea what that means, and that's fine, but ensure what it does mean will?  We're trying to explain this to you. But  In short, what those things are doing on your website, is Google wants to understand what your website is about. So it's got a few ways to do that,  and some of those things there that we mentioned, a wise elements that tell the search engines what your website is actually about, and then helps in turn the search engine to rank using its own special Googleish criteria to actually to rank your website in their own methods that they have. 

[00:03:20] Gillian: I try to match your website to other search. 

[00:03:24]  Saul: Yeah, it's like ... 

[00:03:25]  Gillian: (a nice) relevant results.

[00:03:26]  Saul:  It's like a huge matchmaking service that your Google is essentially trying to match up somebody's searching, who's searching for a particular service online. It has to have some method by which to, to put in order, who shows up first, and  it's a very elaborate algorithm. But the things on your site that assist in that matchmaking service, some of those things we just talked about,

[00:03:55] Gillian: On page SEO is really all about helping Google. Yeah. And of course, then going back to your customers. Well, yeah. Okay, so what about off page SEO? What is off page website optimization?

[00:04:06]  Saul: Is it off the page?

[00:04:08]  Gillian: It is off the page, off the charts. Off page SEO is essentially all about link building. A link is created when an external website provides a hypertext link to your website, and now, link building, there's a lot of myths and someone about the about link building. In the past, in the wild west days of the internet, when it was all knew it was the more links, the better. Now, that is absolutely not the case today. Now, if you're trying to link build, for your pages, aim for a small portfolio of quality links. Now, some simple ways that you can build useful links to your website are just provide a link to your website from your social media accounts such as Facebook and YouTube. You can also link to your website from online business directories such as Yellow pages  and  Yep.  I definitely, any those cheap link building services that you might find online, stay clear with them, they will never be your friend.

[00:05:10] Saul:  Yeah, I know that's right. You don't know what you're getting into when it comes to that. And I work at....

[00:05:17}  Gillian: Google can penalize you for that artificial style of handling

[00:05:21]  Saul: And they certainly do because they know what's going on Google is in a constant, I guess you might call it a battle with just generally everything that happens online, because they have to keep up with other people's attempts to kind of misuse their service or to use it in a way that's going to overly advantage them. Google's job essentially is well, obviously to make themselves money because they're business but also to provide a good service where people can find what they're looking for in a very simply. So what are the..

[00:06:03] Gillian: Google (I) approaches that Google actually wants to help you. Okay, so Google wants to help the customer, the searcher, find the best results of what they're looking for. Yeah, they will help you rank your website, if you help them understand more about your website and part of that is how you a link to, from external sources but they have to be  Quality, reliable repeatable links. Yeah. 

[00:06:28]  Saul: And that's the business today in the business of helping you find what you need to find. So what are some of the other free link building? A link building actions could include, Gill?

[00:06:40] Gillian: Some other simple link building strategies, blogging, guest posting, posting on forums with  useful, useful content and useful comments. Another really popular one that has enormous traction online is infographics and infographic sharing. People absolutely love infographics so if you have a custom infographic developed for your business, you can feature on your website, but you can also share it across social media, and it will get shared, inevitably it's going to happen. Another one is video creation and sharing a video links that go back to your site so that's they're all really simple tips and you can be sure that they actually made it to Google, the things that you can invest the matter to your customers, it ticks both boxes and that's what you always have to check with SEO, is it going to deliver value to your customers. And it is going to help Google understand a little bit more about your business and how you can service 

[00:07:35]  Saul: Yeah, and so just before we move on to. I'll just take a step back and just sort of say that link building just so people a clear on, on link building itself is to why we've just ran over some of the details of link building, but links that link to your website from other sources online. Another important method that Google search engines have to authenticate you and yeah, too. So once again, there's that word that keeps cropping up magically, over and over again, is  trust.  

[00:07:35] Gillian: So it's like your personal network. When you start out in business, you really have to build that network of other people get to know them over time, they trust you over time you build a reputation, establishing if your website is exactly the same. It's called organic because it organic, SEO because it is okay. It was the same way as building relationships and growing a plant it needs to establish over time. Okay, so what are some things though, we'll just return back to our to do list of things that simple things that you can do to boost your on-page SEO. 

[00:08:52] Saul: Yeah. So what do we got there?

[00:08:53]  Gillian: Okay, well, the first thing to take note of is your side speed. Did you know that 47% of your target audience expects your website to load in under two seconds? And Google knows this. They will preference pages that load faster. So you need to be mobile friendly and you need to optimize your pages for load time. Okay, number two, is to make sure you optimize on page, your page titles, any tags and descriptions, and it makes it easy for the Google IOI to know what your page is about, which is what we were saying before, and bring keywords in strategically, but you need to mix it up and make it again for your user. Okay, now the final one.

[00:09:37]  Saul: What's the third one?

[00:09:38]  Gillian.  It is to create content that will actually connect with your audience. Okay, people want to learn more about you, your business, your products, your services, and it goes back to your brand and your vision or your brand expresses all of those things simply. So your content has to always be on target. And you helping people with quality information. So if your content to be practical, useful, interesting and shareable. And you can boost your brand awareness, but always keep those top keyword targets back in the back of your mind. And a blog is really perfect for this.  

[00:10:15]  Saul: Yeah, a blog,  and let's just say to a blog is perfect, and people. There's countless times where people would say when they have a website, I want to blog, but the key thing, having a blog is consistency. If you're going to reverse engineer, what perfect blog experience would be, it would be, first of all, to have a plan for what you're going to write in your blog, and maybe even write some of that content, even before you start your blog, write it in advance and think about it, and work with agency, if that's  a really helpful way for you as well to actually sit down with a strategy for that, because one is going to be time saving to it's going to actually make the best use of this fantastic tool called a blog, and also with having articles generally over 1000 words in length. The reason why is because Google has part of its criteria, certain things, really like that they have very specific criteria that they say, in order for you to rank well, in these particular ways. You need to take these particular boxes, and then that's where agencies come in, to help out and  to work out what those things are, so you can get the best result. 

[00:11:49]  Gillian: I always think of a blog as a win, win. Okay, three wins. It's a win for your customers, because they learn more about your business. Different ways. Okay, when number two, it's a win for Google, because they have the opportunity to learn more about how you can help customers and how to use your pages in search results. And when number three is a win for you, because that ultimately will lead to growth in your business. 

[00:12:16]  Saul: Yeah, that's right. And running a blog is also actually in a completely different topic. It's actually a fantastic way to reflect on what you want to talk about for your business. It's a really fantastic way and with that in mind that's it for today guys. Thanks so much for listening. Before we go. Please don't forget to rate review and subscribe to this podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback. We're on a journey to help local business businesses grow their opportunities online and exceed their goals. Thank you for listening and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye

[00:12:52] Gillian: Bye.