Search Engine Optimization

Gone are the days when you can put up a simple website and expect to rank on the first page of Google with little or no content.  The Internet is huge, and growing by the minute.  Competition is fierce.  Just about any search returns millions of websites.  The difficulty is that if you are not on the first page of Google you will likely never get additional business through search engines.  In today's Internet-based economy this could mean the difference between success and failure.

Without search engines your website can still pay for itself, through use as an on-line catalog or through your own marketing.  However, since you have paid for the site it only makes sense to leverage your investment into additional business through search engine optimization. 

Search engines usually provide contacts interested in making an immediate purchase.  Search engines provide additional business.  The truly amazing thing is that they do all of this for free!  Well, not quite free.  You do have to make the effort to optimize the website and you do have to know what you are doing. 

Although you could optimize the website yourself, it is a smart bet you are better off hiring a professional to do it right.  Too many times clients bring in disastrous websites with poor navigation (which frustrates visitors), broken links (which frustrates search engines), and which were never optimized to bring in additional revenue. 

In short, concerning search engine optimization, you get what you pay for!

Good design makes for a visible website.  It is always a good idea to:

• Use a Textual Menu system (instead of images which look nice but Google cannot see as well)
• Offer a sitemap to important parts of your website (categories)
• Keep list of links reasonable (so you do not drown out important links)
• Set "ALT" on images
• Make sure page title, keywords and description match page content
• Avoid broken links
• Void ? in the URLs.  Many search engines ignore them
• Make sure your site has a robots.txt file
• Make sure your website comes up quickly (slow servers are penalized)
• Give useful content
• Avoid "link schemes"
• Avoid hidden text (colored same as background to hide content)

Google, Bing, Yahoo are all search engines, but what is a search engine anyway?  A search engine crawls the Internet and ranks content.  When you tell a search engine you want to find "red toys," for example, it returns a list of websites which contain both "red" and "toys."

This list would not be much help, however, if search engines did not filter the results and order them by relevance.  We don't really want just any website with the word "red" in it.  We only want it if "red" is prominent.  We don't want websites who mention "toys" once.  We only want it if "toys" appear many times.  Even better, we want websites which mention "red toys" as a phrase.  If the domain has "red" or "toys" in it we are more interested.  If page titles mention "red toys" we likely want to see that page.  If headings list "red toys" that should be at the top of our list too!

Search engines score your web pages and the site as a whole for its score and rank pages by that score.  The list of criteria and algorithm they use is complex and secret.  But many rules can be figured out.  Here is a simple list of things which give your web page a higher score

1. Keywords in the domain
2. Keywords in the page titles
3. Keywords in the headings
4. Keywords appear many times throughout the text
5. Keywords appear in alt information of images (and possibly in the image name itself.)
6. Keywords appear in links to other websites
7. Keywords appear in links from other websites
8. Keywords appear sooner in the web page (instead of further down)
9. Keywords appear in many pages throughout the website (larger websites do much better on rankings)

There are many other factors.  Among them:

1. Don't have empty or nearly empty web pages
2. Avoid dead links in your website
3. Avoid keyword stuffing issues (focus on content to avoid this problem)

Understanding how search engines rank your website will help you understand what you need to do in order to rank highly.

Don't just take our word for it.  See what others have been saying about our great services and support!  We offer local, in-house support with old fashioned face-to-face meetings.  So drop by for a cup of coffee while we update your website!