Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

So, your site is built, it's been submitted to all the major search engines (and hopefully included). Now you can sit back and wait for internet visitors to find you in their droves.

Well, not quite. Unless your site has been properly optimised for the search engines, you may appear poorly - or not at all - in the rankings.(And, let's face it, if you don't apear in the top twenty or so for a given search, the chances are no one's going to end up finding you).

Getting a high search engine ranking is a highly competitive business (and the rewards have never been greater) so you have to do what you can to ensure your website design offers properly accessibility to search engines andis focused in ways that will help it achieve a higher ranking. With web owners trying to trick (or "spam") the search engines in increasingly clever ways, the search engines are developing increasingly complex algorithms to assess the relevance of each site.

It can appear a bit daunting - do a search on "Sports Equipment" for instance, and Yahoo will bring back 17,000,000 results. What work is involved in getting in the Top 10 of that bunch? Especially when the big boys are spending fortunes on improving their search engine rankings each year?

Well, without spending lots of money, you maybe can't compete with the big boys on such an all-encompassing world-wide search as "Sports equipment", but, if you're a sports equipment retailer in Newcastle, there is a lot you can do to ensure you get a good ranking when someone searches on "Sports shops, Newcastle".

We'll build your site carefully,with the following optimisation considerations in mind, to help you get the best ranking possible:

Relevant page content - search engines are increasingly sharp on the relevancy of the words on your page, including page titles
Location and frequency of "keywords" on each page - copy needs to be written so that key words and phrases (that visitors search for you by) appear in the right place on each page.
Avoiding spamming/overuse of words that will be penalised by search engines
Link analysis - correct placement of internal and external hyperlinks. (the more relevant sites point to yours, the more your site is judged to be popular, thus higher ranking).
Page construction and elements on a page - incorrectly structured, images, tables, javascript and many other elements can make life harder for the spiders to crawl the page. Use of frames in pages can still be an issue for some engines
Inclusion of a site map
Inclusion of meta tags - these invisible pieces of information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages, though less relevant to search engines these days, can still sometimes help
Use of ALT tags to define images (and contain key words)
Judicious use of images and Flash content which can make for slower page download times and can interrupt spiders crawling the site

Once your site is optimised and submitted, we recommend it is re-submitted periodically, and certainly when there are any key changes made to the site. See website maintenance.

Beware false promises!

The optimisation techniques, above, will not guarantee you success in the search engine ratings war alone. But they will give you a real chance of getting a decent ranking on relevant keyword searches and they can be developed and improved upon.

There are hordes of companies out there that will "guarantee you Top 10 search engine ratings". Logic says that can't all be right and you can end up spending a lot of money for nothing. But there are reputable specialist SEO companies that can take your site a stage further if it's a priority for you in the future.

If you want to start researching likely key words yourself, visit Wordtracker to get some ideas on what words and phrases people might be typing in to find your products and services.

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Beware false promises!

Building your website - a start to finish guide :