Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an ever evolving thing on the internet. It is the in-exact science of building a website that will rank well in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest of the search engines out there.

Some key factors have remained pretty much constant as the search engine algorithms have changed over the years. We have found that SEO consists out of mainly 2 parts - On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO basically entails that your website is programmed in a search engine friendly way. There are several factors that we look at to ensure this, with some of the most important being:

1.  Good quality content on your homepage - this is the first page Google and the rest will see when they "look" at your website - think about it, would you rather want good content, describing the nature of your business, or a nice looking image (that search engines cannot "see" by the way), saying "Click here to enter"?

2.  Visible navigation links - if your navigation links are hidden away in JavaScript of flash, then the search engines will not see them, and thus won't be able to index your website.

3.  Meta Tags - that is the Title, Keywords and Description tags for your website - these must be keyword (or rather "keyphrase") rich, and decently researched (you don't want to rank for a keyword that nobody searches for hey?)

4.  A lot of small things, like making sure the site is W3C compliant, the images have descriptive alt tags, and even making sure that your date in the footer is the correct year for example.

We build all of our websites to adhere to the above rules by default (unless our clients want something out of the ordinary of course)

Off-page SEO

The main idea behind the off-page SEO is to have good quality links from other websites to yours, without you linking back to them (although, links exchanges have their place as well...) - we call these "inbound links".

We have been doing some in depth researching, and have compiled a brand new SEO offering:

If you'd like more information on the above packages, or would like to order, contact us

What NOT to do

Search Engine Optimization is unfortunately not something that happens overnight - depending on how popular your chosen keywords are, it can take a few weeks, or even months to start ranking well.

Some people do what we call "black-hat SEO" - it entails getting thousands of links to your site practically overnight - if the search engines catch you doing something like this, they will ban your website, and you will never rank again. If you can get a steady stream of new links to your site every month, that will really help your website in achieving top rankings on the internet.

SEO is a timely process unfortunately, but if you keep at it (with our help), you can get a website that ranks well in the search engines, and provide you with good quality traffic that converts to sales.

Last thing to remember

I have been doing web design for about 5 years now, which is not long. What I've talked about above is based on my personal experience, and I have had great results so far. Some people will definitely disagree with me on some of my thoughts, and that is fine, I am sure there are many things I didn't mention or cover.

Just know that a website means nothing if people can't find it, and also know that it is constant work to ensure that you site keeps on ranking in the search engines. Also know that we are committed to helping you, and helping your website to be a valuable and worthwhile investment for your business.