Creating solutions that work for your business

Search engine optimisation

How your web site will work for you

Your web site will need to work for you. The importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as a neccessary tool for promoting a business web site is well accepted.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimisation is a process which involves preparing your site in order to show and improve page ranking for your web site and content by means of the relevance of your site within any search engine ranking system for any given keywords or phrases, by assessing and developing web site content in such a way as to make your site relevant for business or industry specific searches.

Put simply, search engine optimisation helps your web page rank higher in a search engine listing when someone searches for a keyword or phrase that is present in your web site content.

SEO working with other marketing tools

While search engine optimisation is invaluable for increasing web site visits, improving your page ranking and is a great way to increase web site traffic, it is also something that works well with other web marketing tools.

The use of paid advertising, such as adwords and other pay per click services, in conjunction with a good page position can often encourage visitors to click on your listing.

The addition of more traditional marketing methods, such as direct mail and e-mail campaigns, alongside pay per click advertising and good search engine rankings, all help to promote the image and identity of your business.

It is believed that a staggering percentage of consumers find products and service from an internet search. This may be partially through searching for a known brand or provider, but there will certainly be significant numbers of people who will search for a specific product or service, then select one from the page listing.

This increases the need for brand awareness and the promotion of your products and services within any available medium. Simply put, if a potential customer receives an e-mail, reads an ad in a magazine, then sees a search engine ranking for the same company, it could be argued that the brand is being promoted.

This is how search engine optimisation can fit in as a supplemental promotional tool for your business, working well with other marketing activity to promote awareness of you, your products and services

The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process

The process of search engine optimisation is fairly consistent for most web sites and involves processes including:

Some of these optimisation processes are less involved for new web sites and most processes can be carried out concurrently.

The requirements and implementation process for search engine Optimisation and submissions will vary, depending on the site, technology and current level of compliance. There are no sites, subjects or business areas that cannot be optimised for search engine rankings.

How long search engine optimisation takes

The time taken to carry out search engine optimisation is based on several factors.

  • Whether we are working with a new or current web site
  • The size of the web site
  • Whether the web site has static or dynamic content
  • The proposed market for the web site and its competitiveness

More consideration of the process would b neccessary based on the individual project, but these would be the most fundamental factors to take into consideration

Competitive businesses and search engine rankings

Some businesses are in a very mature and popular marketplace. Unfortunately, this normally means more competition for those much wanted top ten sites listed.

Some keywords searches may return several million pages in the listing. In a normal situation, if you were 50th out of 2 million, you'd be quite pleased with your status, but statistically, on search engines, you haven't done that well

There are techniques for popular and competitive searches, that allow sites to rank better in circumstances that increase their position by optimising pages for keywords and phrases that are based on the main terms used, but are less well used in web pages, so searches return less results and fewer competitors.

Using this and other techniques, it is possible to increase traffic to your web site, even in very competitive search areas.

How the search engine thinks

Some sites may already enjoy a reasonable or even remarkable search engine ranking without ever spending any time or resources on a search engine strategy.

This may like an odd thing for a company selling search engine optimisation as a service to tell you, but, amongst other things, it proves one very important fact about search engines. Search engines thrive on information.

Most sites with a good ranking, achieved without any specific search engine optimisation techniques employed, will be sites offering rich and varied subject matter from such things as articles, forums and blogs.

In a similar way to 'a million monkeys, a million years, a million typewriters = the works of Shakespeare', many sites with large repositories of data will have built of a complex and varied set of keywords and phrases, spread cross thousands of pages, that to a search engine robot are like nectar to a bee.

A search engine's job, simply put, is to convert your search word or phrase into a list of resources that it believes will provide you with the information you are looking for, with the most relevant in its opinion, at the top.

This highlights an important factor when dealing with search engines, SEO and site listings.

Search engines all rank differently

It is clear that search engines all use their own technology and ranking rules. The basic concept of all search engines is the same, but the way they process and evaluate web page content is certainly different.

This is proven by the way some web sites rank well in one search engine but may be 2 or pages lower in another. The most popular search engine, and by definition the place where most web sites would like to be number 1, is Google. This does not mean that we should dismiss other search engines. There are many more very successful, well known and well used search engines such as MSN, Yahoo and Alta Vista as well as many well used but less well known ones such as Wiki Seek (Used to search Wikis), Dogpile and HotBot

This proves 2 things.

  • That all search engines will react differently to the same page content
  • There are many less well known search engines that can be used effectively and more efficiently to increase site traffic

Search engine rankings are a numbers game

Given that the sole intention of a web site, employing search engine optimisation, is to drive extra traffic to their web site, it is important to be aware of some logical and quite re-assuring facts about the most efficient use of the SEO process.

A company may spend many hours and a great deal of resources on trying to achieve a good ranking in google for widgets (A popular example product, used extensively in computer programming examples, so why not here?). Now is widgets are the most popular product on the internet, it will return listings in the millions. Our example company may achieve a listing in this very competitive area of 50, the foot of page 5. For this level of competition, this is a respectable performance, but will not increase web site visits too much.

Now another company, with the same problem, that of selling widgets in a very competitive marketplace, decide to spend their time and resources on the promotion of their site in 3 or 4 less well known search engines. In the same time period they achieve 2 page 1 listings, a page 2 listing and a page 4 listing.

If a search for widgets in google is performed 1 million times a year, page 1 gets 1 million views. Page 5, where company 1 are, gets maybe 10,000 views (a modest 1% of searchers drilled down to page 5 or more). Not too bad really you may think?

A search for widget on the 4 less used search engines is performed 100,000 times in a year. Now if we assume a fairly even split, company 2 get 50,000 views a year, plus a little extra kudos for appearing on page 1 of a search engine, this exercise has been more cost effective and has probably resulted in more page visits for company 2.

This is just an example of how a properly managed and executed search engine optimisation strategy may result in better results by understanding the industry and playing the percentages. It is statistically more difficult to gain a prominent search engine ranking on google, because the number of web sites pushing for these positions is greater. Much like the use of keywords derived from popular terms, but targeted less by SEO companies, thereby returning less competition, selecting the more statistically beneficial search engines or locations can increase the chances of success. The real results are gained when, once the traffic is being generated, having a web site that is relevant to their needs and promotes your product or service properly.

Feeding the search engine

If you provide search engines with what they like, and what they like is information, you will rank better for a subject than if you don't provide anything that a search engine believes will be relevant to a searcher looking for information by using a keyword or phrase.

After all, the search engine is working for the person performing the search, so it makes sense that it will do its utmost to provide relevant page listings for keywords and phrases.

The use of links within text, if linking to relevant information and resources, helps the search engine rank your pages higher. Is also useful for the reader to allow them to get access to greater amounts of information easily. Again, something a search engine will respond to with a better page ranking.

What search engines DO NOT like

Search engines rely on very complex and sensitive algorithms to rank pages in their listings. It cannot be stressed enough that search engines like information and relevance on keyword topics abovee all else

Search engine providers are experts at managing and manipulating data. Some of the most vast and complex data repositories in the world are those held by search engine companies. Because they have so much data to process, rank and maintain, they are very efficient at spotting trends and processes that are trying to buck their systems.

There are many tricks that SEO companies may try to give you a better ranking, but these are either well known or will be discovered very quickly by the search engine administrators. Subsequently, you site ranking will plummet and you my even be removed from the search engine listing altogether.

It is important for any company that promotes web sites by using search engine optimisation techniques knows and understands the policies and guidelines published by search engines. If you understand and follow guidelines published by search engines, you will not receive any problems with trying to improve your page position in their rankings and you will also achieve a higher ranking if the search engine sees your pages meet those guidelines.

What we will not do to promote your site

We will never use any promotional method that goes against any published search engine guidelines or acceptable usage policy.

We will not engage in any typo-squatting or misleading representation of brands or terms, cloaking or spamming

Identifying the business area of your web site

This process will find where we think your web site should appear. It will give us invaluable insight into a consistent keyword strategy and highlight potential areas of promotion that may not be immediately obvious

Analysing web stats and web server usage

If you have a current web site, we will analyse your current performance and popularity. This gives us a starting point for traffic analysis but also adds to our definition of search terms and information that will begin the process of optimisation.

Identifying search trends most relevant to your web site

We will cross reference the most popular search terms available from your site statistic and business area, then analyse the marketplace accordingly to identify common and niche sectors for your product or service.

Identifying the most popular keywords and phrases used in relevant searches

A composite of your business type, products, web statistics, competitors and most importantly your definition of your industry will allow us to present a list of the most appropriate keywords and phrases for your web site.

Checking the web site for correct structure and the proper use of html elements

This process ensure that we make maximum use of the technical requirements for a properly constructed web site. This is an important part of presenting a search engine friendly structure, making the robot's job easier.

Writing title and meta information to match keyword usage

Based upon our definition of keywords and phrases and content most relevant to your site, we will construct a hierarchy of information that will best demonstrate your web site to search engines. This is more important to some search engines than others, but ultimately is the foundation of presenting topical efficiency to the robots and crawlers that check your site for information.

Editing and adding copy to pages for enhanced informational value

This process compliments the keywords used for page title and meta information by assuring the search engine robot that the topics claimed most relevant in the title and meta tags are indeed those covered most informatively in the body of the web page.

This is a very important consideration, as a search engine must be assured that your page contains what it claims to. A web page bearing little or no relevance or association with the title or meta-information will not rank.

Adding pages and additional resources of relevant information

Many web sites cover topics, businesses, products or services that, upon analysis, are often more rich and varied than first thought. This may necessitate in the addition of extra pages, used to contain and present further relevant information about the company, product or service not initially covered in the main parts or the web site.

Additional pages may also be added to present extra or subsidiary information to the visitor regarding a topic covered only briefly in another page. The need for clear, relevant and concise information in a web site is important not only for your human visitors but for robots who will be your most ardent critic.

Creating a site map

A site map often helps visitors find relevant information about your web site, but is important to allow search engine crawlers and robots to navigate your site and compare links within your web site to the actual content presented to the public.

Assessing any additional data or information that may be utilised for SEO purposes

Many businesses have lots of valuable information that is of relevance to their business. This can often offer a significant advantage when presenting a web site to the world.

Submitting sites to the major search engines where they are currently un-listed

Many search engines will find sites eventually, but you can begin this process by submitting your site manually.

If the web site and domain name is new or once we have assured ourselves a web site is not listed in a search engine, we will, upon completion of our work, tell the search engine about your web site.

Removing obsolete or missing pages from search engines

If any sites have old, missing or irrelevant information cached for your web site, we will ask the search engine for these to be removed from their listing. We will cater properly for any circumstance where missing pages are returned to ensure these do not effect your rankings.

Identifying what search engines currently see when robots visit your site

What a robot has access to is important. How a robot sees your site and web pages is also important. We will ensure that robots visiting your site are presented with a properly constructed, easy to follow site to compliment the useful and informative content they will also find.

Restricting content with a robots.txt file

Some areas of your web site may need to be kept out of search engine listings. We will tell robots where we would not like them to visit, so any private or administration pages are ignored.

Checking and validating HTML and CSS against W3C standards

Standards are very important. They ensure web sites conform to the requirements of the browser, the world wide web and their own claimed content or structure. Because search engine robots use html and css element to navigate and assess the content of your web site, it is important that your site is structured correctly.

Assuring accessibility guidelines (WCAG and WAI) are followed

Any web site that requires accessibility for people with disability or special needs must conform to standards set out by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This not only helps the web site visitor, but also tells the search engine important things about your web site.

Glossary of terms used in this page

Many terms used in this page may not be well known to the reader or may require explanation. We have provided a list of terms used in this page that visitors may find useful

Information used on this web site

The information used and prsented on this web site is to the best of our knowledge, authoratative and correct. Like most web sites, the content will be changed, edited and improved as time goes on.

The topics covered here are vast and as such there is much more information available on the topics of search engine optimisation and accessibility than it is prudent to include here, but we have done our best to provide the most relevant information as we see it on one of the services we provide.

We recommend that you use the vast resources available on the internet for any additional information you may need. Links to some good search engines are included in this document. We also welcome any questions you may have regarding our services and the information we have povided here. You will find how to get in touch with us on our contact page

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