SEO Titbits

SEO work / investigation observations

Your site may be old and if its still coded using tables and inline CSS this wont necessarily affect your SEO (or if it does its negligible). It just makes website maintenance a bit trickier and take longer. I would normally  like to get it re-written before a SEO project begins but if cost is an issue it is not vital.

Table website code

Tables do not interfere with SEO directly but we have never built a website completely using tables as when it comes to updating your site it will be more complex and time consuming. If we take on an SEO project with a table based website we normally estimate how quickly the website could be converted to table-less css (using DIVs) and then give the website owner an idea cost wise. Another aspect of tackling SEO projects for table based websites is that normally the ‘old table based html code’ is full of errors (using w3c validation) this may make your website not render correctly in all browsers / internet devices. Ideally there are no errors in the code or css.
Your website will normally need a ‘primary search term’ that is searched for within the uk and  globally a large number of times per months, ensuring that the SEO focus is valid, relevant and worthwhile. We normally focus on 5-8  search terms to optimise the website for. These terms are recorded at the beginning of the SEO project to monitor progress against.
If the website doesnt have any website stats installed then by default we install them and then  give the website owner an automated Google monthly report of their website visitors.
As I have said previously we adopt a ‘holistic’ approach to seo and will make changes (with the website owner’s onsent) to the site that arent 100% SEO related if we believe the changes may improve site performance or visitor convertibility. An example change that isn’t specifically SEO may be to recommend that there is the sites email address or contact link at the top right part of all website pages .

Webcopy

Content is always the cornerstone of most SEO projects and if we havent been commissioned to produce the content  we will be requesting the client  to complete text for the website when we think its required, the alternative is to get us to do it but to keep your costs down we sometimes suggest you do it yourself if the current website text is good enough (meaning its unique / relavant and has high ‘readability grades).
Sometimes a website has lots of  good unique text but if we come across an area of weakness it is identified and webcopy created to fill the lack of webcopy on a relevant topic . There isn’t a maximum amount of text for a website, indeed more webcopy is better nearly always as long as its optimised correctly. Its possible that when we examine a website we could decide that the webpages contain too much text and are very long and could be reduced making additional pages from the existing text. Ideally each page is only ‘optimised’ for  1-2 key search terms so smaller pages correctly optimised is something we recommend.
To begin an SEO project we normally need all the access details for the control panel / ftp, CMS system  and Blog (eg WordPress). We need the control panel details to add an email account, when we do that give the website owner the details so that they can have access to it but normally the account is redundant after a few months as it will be used for adding the website to directories and  blogging to add increase the amount of links to the site.
I would hope to get the initial SEO report to the client after 2 weeks and then within 1 month another report would be sent giving exact details of exactly what has been done. This second activity report represents about 80% of the work done but subsequent work is completed for link building in the second and third months.
When any SEO project begins we really look forward to creating initial metrics then working on improving the website visitor numbers and rankings accordingly. Its important to state that the website owner should do not expect instant massive increases in visitor numbers and rankings, everything to do with ‘white hat’ or good SEO should be slowly and steadily. Ranking and visitor numbers will go up obviously but its important not to expect a doubling of visitor numbers within 2 weeks, as some people incorrectly believe is possible, saying that  it is actually possible (we have actually done this before once) but its very unlikely to happen often unless the website was previously ignored, had been penalised by Google or hacked!