Optimise your website for search engines
The greatest website in the world is no good to anyone if it can’t be found. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website so that it comes up in search engine results for certain keywords. The better optimised your website is, the higher up your search engine ranking will be.
Here are some easy (and free) steps you can take to optimise your website so that it shows up in search engine rankings for your target customers.
- Research the keywords you want to rank highly in search engines for. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool is a great way of doing this. For instance “pubs” as a keyword is searched for by over 1.5 million times a month in the UK, “pub quiz” over 150.000 times a month, “pub food” 175,000 and so on.
- Use those keywords in your content, but exercise restraint. You don’t want to stuff your content with the same keyword 200 times in a 350-word web page, because it makes for a bad reading experience for your target customers. It could also get you penalised by Google – and you don’t want that.
- Links are considered currency on the web. So try getting links to your website in good content on high-ranking websites. Links to your site are known as backlinks, and are at their most valuable when you include the keywords in a natural way. This is because it tells search engines that your website is trusted, which makes them more likely to push you up the search rankings, meaning your site will appear higher in a keyword search. You should definitely resist the temptation to buy links from companies promising to boost your search engine rankings and only trade links with relevant websites to your pub or locality.
Other features you might consider
Many pub websites now feature such things as an events calendar, the roster of Sky/BT sports programming you are showing, a subscriber newsletter, table booking, online food ordering, customer reviews and offers/vouchers. Perhaps the most important of extra features one must consider is “Is my website mobile-friendly?” With the inexorable rise of the smartphone your website has to be readable on the small screens of mobile phones. All of these require additional coding and integration into the website.
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