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".

Now, there are several ways of getting inbound links:

1.  You can search for free online directories, and submit your site to them (this doesn't cost you anything if you do it yourself, it just takes time to do it).

2.  Write articles (or get someone to write them for you) and submit them to article directories - the key here is to include a few links to your website in your articles, so when other people use your article, those links must stay in tact, and thus you get more links to your website.

3.  Start blogging (see our article on the effectiveness of blogging) - another thing that you can do yourself, create a blog (we recommend www.blogger.com) and start blogging. About 1-3 posts a week should do nicely, then make sure your blog is set up in such a way that it always links back to your website. Plus, as an added bonus, a blog is seen as it's own website, and can generate it's own traffic as well - the more the better!

4.  Get SOCIAL! Start a Facebook page and get a Twitter account for your business - you can even link these two up. Think about it, if you have 500 fans/likes on your Facebook page, and have a special, you immediately have 500 people you can tell about it. Another way is to get social yourself, find some nice forums, and start taking part in conversations - forums usually allow you to customize your footer (a great place to put a link back to your site...)

5.  Links exchanges - you will get lots of people who contact you for links exchanges, but links are valuable on the internet, only do links exchanges where you get something of equal or greater value in return - we'll gladly advise you when you get a links exchange request.

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.