Dear Dan,
To briefly introduce myself, my name's Mal Darwen and I work for
www.wordtracker.com customer service. I stumbled over your thread, and thought it was worth a reply.
I must confess I did have some difficulty finding your site to have a look at so I hope that
http://www.matrixcomputers.co.uk/index.html is correct!
Looking through your site, I do have some suggestions for your SEO. Without an intimate knowledge of your company I did some research around your core services on the Wordtracker tool. This should show that the search volumes for Scottish specific computer service and related terms aren't very high, but there are things you can do. Despite there not being a lot of geographic searches being made in your area, it's clear that people in the UK are searching on things like 'computer help', 'slow computer', 'affordable computer help'. An online business like yours, having the facility to mail order or to offer online support to customers outside your area can be invaluable. For example, you can give some good advice to someone in Southampton, and they might tell their granny in Oban that the lovely guy just down the road from her knows his stuff, and she could call him to get her first computer and learn how to e-mail... spurious, I know, but I think you'll get my meaning.
Having your company name in the title bar of your site, and the header of your body text is satisfying to see, but unless you have a company that is well recognised on a national or international level, it's unlikely to help in terms of search engines ranking you highly. If you use words and phrases that are relevant to your business activity (computer services, computer help, etc) in those places and also in the body of your copy, the engines will respond more positively over time.
In the world of SEO, content is king - if you write about what you do, incorporating carefully chosen keywords in the text, again, the search engines will notice this - one of the interesting things I have found in exploring how search engines operate is that they look for evidence of human activity on the net - if you write articles, case studies, keep a blog, all of these things can help as part of an SEO campaign.
...and on I go - I'll close here, but to say that it's well worth educating yourself in google analytics (easy to find by searching), which will allow you to track your site's traffic, and show you which keywords people are using to come to your site, and allow you to take those keywords and build on them. Many online marketeers these are looking at what keywords people are using to search before they even decide what product they are going to market on.
I hope this is useful - in terms of keyword research I can recommend that you take the free trial at Wordtracker to explore what you can do with it - you can check it out at
http://www.wordtracker.com/trial - or you can feel free to contact us at
support@wordtracker.com for advice on the tool.
I wish you the best of success with your project - the above is by no means a comprehensive guide to SEO, merely a brief outline, but it should give you a starting point.
all the best,
Mal
