How We Suggest To Improve Ranking:

There are many ways to improve your rankings in the search engines. Some of these ways can be very technical at a program code level and some can be very complex. The good news is as a website owner and someone who can use a HTML WYSIWYG editor like Adobe Dreamweaver, there are many ways to easily and quickly improve the rank you achieve in the search engines. Don’t think that you can get something for nothing as it takes effort, knowledge and time to achieve these gains and it’s important to know what you are doing as too much or the wrong type of on site optimisation could be classed as bad or ‘black hat’ optimisation and will result in your site being downgraded or marked down in the search indexes. Take a look at our search engine results from previous SEO projects.

A vast majority of web site visitors that are searching for goods, products and information on the web arrive at a website through the search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing. So it’s vital to feature in the search indexes and also to feature in the first two pages of the search terms that are important to your business. You have to be listed in the first two pages as 85% of all internet searches settle on a site they find on the first two pages or top twenty results.

It goes without saying that the sites on the first two pages of any search results get the lions share of the visitors and more enquiries and sales. Here are some of the major factors that you have control over to enhance your Search Engine Ranking

Title

This is shown on the bar at the top of your web browser (Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer or Firefox). and normally shown as the main heading in the search engine results. This is the most important on site factor in your SEO and it’s essential that your site title has the main search terms ⁄ keywords in it.

A poor choice of title:

‘Delicious’ or ‘Home Page’ or “Untitled”!

A better title would be:

“Webdesign and SEO for Essex”

it’s very simple to find and amend your title by editing the HTML in your web page or if you have a CMS website its even easier to update your page title from within your CMS without changing ‘code’.

Ensure every title one on every page varies to reflect what is in the page and they all should feature the key ‘search terms’ that you want to attract. The title and description should have the most important search term at the start.

Website Content

This is important because Google etc actually look at all the text on your page which is used to evaluate your page to work out if your page actually reflects what is in the title and description, the old adage that ‘content is king’ holds true, almost without exception every high-ranking site is there as it has quality original content that is written with lots of valuable targeted search terms distributed in it. Ensure that the text on your page is totally relevant to your theme (title ⁄ description), readable and has a reasonable density of your key search terms, but more importantly ensure that the content in your site reflects one that you would value as a website visitor yourself.

Back Links

Originally Google was known as back rub, so-called as it collated and analysed the back links (hyperlinks from a site) to a target site, this method was not something that Yahoo had not used before and Google used this method as one of the factors to establish the popularity of a site and after a certain amount of back links are established the relevance of that site in relationship to a certain search term ⁄ keywords.

Due to the massive success of Google in identifying popular and relevant sites all the main search engine use back links to establish the sites seniority and relevance to certain keywords.

Apart from certain Google Engineers there are not many people who know exactly how the back link algorithm works but we have a reasonable idea, which is generally believed to be, that If site has a link from another website that counts as a plus point and if that site is from a site in a similar industry and ⁄ or the keywords on the hyperlink are one of the sites targeted keywords then that is a bigger plus point, and so the plus points are added up to give a Google page rank for each website page.

Websites that are in the same business to yours or sites that regulate your industry or are associations of your industry are ideal sites to get your website link. Therefore if you had a diving website you would like links from other dive websites and also from PADI the dive association you belong to and the more links from ‘good sites’ the better. These good sites are also graded by Google and the higher the ‘Pagerank’ of these sites the bigger the plus points you receive when the site links to you. So using the diving company website as an example if PADI (current pr is 6 of PADI.com) links to you then this is a very good back link that will enhance the standing of your website, a link from padi.com will have a bigger impact on the site than links from a new site with no relevance to the diving industry and indeed if this new site has links to lots of other non-related site then this might have no impact on your sites search engine rank.

Links to your website from other websites are as discussed earlier counted as plus points even if they are reciprocal links but if they are not reciprocated then that link holds higher value. The idea being that the site that is linked to without needing to give a link back to the other site is classed as important and one of high quality, so it’s a good idea to develop reciprocal and non-reciprocal links, this is time-consuming and requires time and financial commitment but is worth it long-term to develop your website standing in the indexes.

Meta Tags

Previously important but now not really read by Google but only possibly by Yahoo and Bing and some of the smaller engines, it’s import and for these to contain words from your page and nothing else.

Summary of Search Engine Rankings

Google, MSN and Yahoo search engine rankings are now vital for your business to succeed on the Internet, as the vast majority of people will use a search engine to find a product or service they need. When coding your website always think that search engines are there to provide the most relevant, important and correct information content for their users and this should be remembered when creating your website. Short term you may be able to trick the search engines to think that your site is more important than it actually is (by using bad or black hat SEO techniques) but long-term quality original content and search engine friendly coding of your website will always rank higher than the poorly coded sites that apply bad ‘quick fix’ techniques to rank highly.

Also take a look at our other web design services and website portfolio.

Delivering Delicious Websites Affordably

SEO tips

SEO pointers to follow or use:

• Do not duplicate content in your pages.
• Your main page title should be one of your key search terms and coded as HTML Heading 1 (H1).
• Ensure that your navigation structure links to all your pages and that you do not have any orphan pages.
• Add as much relevant content in your target market as you can.
• Keep pages to a reasonable size and add new pages instead of having super long ones.
• Concentrate on a few key search terms, you will not be number one or even on the first page of
• Google for every single search term in your market.
• Proof read your content, spell check it and grammar check it then get a second opinion.
• Investigate the keywords people use to find the information or product / service you are offering, without targeting the correct keywords you may be wasting your SEO efforts.
• Ensure your site is W3C validated, not too important now but in the future a possible bigger factor in the Google Algorithm.
• Use the same keywords in your title, your description and your H1 title as well as in the content ideally at the start and in other places in the content.
• Submit your site to the search engines yourself.
• If you use Flash Navigation ensure you duplicate this navigation at the bottom of your page in good old HTML.
• If content is King then links are most definitely the Queen, so build your network slowly and carefully, quality sites are more important that same ranking sites.
• Don’t bother to use your company name in your Title.
• Use ALT tags for your images (this is now needed for W3C compliance now also).
• Create a sitemap for your site.
• Social marketing is the next big thing so get on Digg, Facebook and Myspace.
• Have a 301 redirect (using the .htaccess file) and redirect your non www domain to the www domain (delicious-webdesign.com to www.delicious-webdesign.com).
• Don’t rename / reorganise the pages on your site after they have been indexed and if you do ensure you have a 301 redirect in place.
• Have a 404 error page setup to capture mistyped URLs.
• sign-up to Google’s webmaster tools.
• Use Bullet point for lists.
• Don’t steal content or duplicate your own content on other pages.
• Embolden your keywords in your content.
• Review your sites SEO every few months, you can use SEO tools and evaluation tools to check how your site rates.
• Use Google Analytics or other web stats packages as you don’t know how effective your SEO is becoming unless you can see how many visitors your site is getting.
• Select a search engine friendly domain name and use search engine friendly URLs hot-holidays.com/europe/spain-ibiza.html is much better than happyjohn.com/destination1.html.
• Freshen up your content regularly, content gets stale and outdated quickly so get it reviewed and rewritten regularly.
• Get your site listed more quickly by linking to it from an already indexed site.
• Avoid Flash apart from in small banners, currently even though Google could index Flash pages there are no evidence that Google actually does.
• Follow all the Google Webmaster guidelines.

SEO pointers not to follow or use:

• Entrance ⁄ Doorway pages.
• Cloaking (displaying a different page to visitor than to search bots).
• Link farms.
• Spamming keywords within your page.
• Small ⁄ unreadable text.
• Text with the same colour as the background.

Summary of our SEO Services

• Initial site creation with Search Engine Optimization in mind for all aspects of the development
• Page Rank Improvement.
• Content / Article Writing.
• Forum Posting.
• Directory Submission.
• Social Bookmarking.
• Blog Commenting.
• Professional SEO Statistics.
• Customised SEO reporting.