Part 1: Pub SEO. Search Engine Optimisation for Pubs in Sydney
What are organic browser search results and why are they so important to Sydney pubs?It is common to see pubs in Sydney with expensive looking websites. These sites designed to cleverly and stylishly sell the message there venues wants patrons to see. But they do little for pub SEO, as they are invisible to Seach Engines and the local Sydney organic search engine results. All because they are not speaking the right language. Most of these Sydney pubs must be becoming quite disillusioned towards web marketing. However pub SEO will significantly lift patronage.
They are also known as the free listings that appear when you search with Google, Bing, Yahoo or any one of the available search engines. A typical search engine will have the paid advertisers listing at the top of a search results page and down the right hand side. The majority of the rest of the page is dedicated to organic search results to the search query, listed in order of relevance, as determined by the search engine. These organic results have ten times the click through rate of the search results in the advertised section. The top three organic search results get a staggering 70 % of the traffic generated from results pages. And it’s free, well it can be if the pubs site speaks the right language and appears relevant enough. There’s the rub.
Firstly the pubs web site must speak the right language, HTML. Many pubs in Sydney have lavish sites developed using Flash. Some Sydney pubs even expect visitors to download the Shockwave Flash plugin before they can view the site. Just about all the visitors without the Shockwave plugin will just move on. Statistically the more times a searcher has to click, the less likely they are to do so. Although visitors to these Flashy sites are rewarded with a rich media experience, when what they are actually after is information. Another downside with such sites is search engines cannot read Flash content and any search terms and relevant content in a website built with Flash will not help your site get into a search engines top organic rankings. It will not help pub SEO. The language your web site should be written in is good old fashioned HTML.
The user experience of a pub website is important in attracting patrons but it has to be balanced with the ability for search engines to determine it relevance to a user Search Term. If you want all the “wiz bang” of a Flash built site and a rich interactive user interface and you want search engines to find and rank your site then the Flash content must be embedded into HTML code. Flamboyant design needs to integrate information that is relevant and readable to the Search Bots artificial sensibilities. For it is the HTML code with relevant search term mentioned in the right proportion, compared with the rest of your written content, that will yield a good page rank and improve pub SEO.
Pubs in Sydney should make sure their websites meta data is relevant to the search terms you want to be found under. Meta data appears in the “header” information of your HTML code. It includes information like the description of your site of service, the keywords people use when searching for your pubs offerings. The written content, body copy should also make use of keywords. This is known as keyword density. To further improve the pub SEO name your pictures with the desired search term in the Alternate Text field for at least one of your pictures per page . Search engines can’t see what is in a picture so pictures should have a description embedded in the HTML. Flash content should be named in the same way.
The simplicity in which copy is written is also important. Short direct sentence without superfluous descriptive terms will improve the pages search engine visibility. There is a test that can be applied to determine this known as the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. It’s a mathematical algorithm and likely to be beyond the scope of non-mathematicians, so better just to follow the rule of keeping it simple and straight forward.
In conclusion, make sure the HTML generated content of your pubs web site include the search terms your potential customers would be using. Make sure pictures and flash content have descriptions embedded in the HTML code. The meta data should be include keywords (key search terms) and a concise description. Keywords should also appear in the copy of the page, but not to the point that it affects human readability or the flow of the copy. Itegrating these principles into your website will place your pub a lot higher up the Sydney search rankings.
Continue reading:
Part 2: Get Your Pub Website Found On The Internet
Pubs in Sydney, Pub SEO