Services Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of making your website appear the most relevant to search engines when they index the content on your website. When someone types a relevant keyword phrase into a search engine, we will do our best to make your website appear in the number 1 position. Organic search engine results (those that are not paid for) can provide up to and over 70% of traffic to your website, making SEO the most sought after service to increase targeted visitors to your website.

Gaining higher rankings involves analysing the website to determine which aspects can be modified or upgraded. There are over 100 ways to increase a websites search engine visibility. When combined together, optimal search engine visibility will be achieved. It is for this reason that every website requires a different approach, as not all websites are built using the same methods.

Some of the major things we take a look at when optimising your website are:

• Website coding (HTML, CSS, Flash, CMS etc.)
• Internal/External linking structure
• Content placement and amount
• Your competitors
• Your current indexing in search engines.

Website coding is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation as these are the building blocks of your site. With the correct code in place, your website can gain full exposure to the search engines.

Content to code ratio is what is most important here. When a search engine looks at your site, it sees more than just the text that you see in your browser window. It sees all the code that goes into making that page presentable. Therefore, ideally you want to have 0% code and 100% content. Of course that is not possible, however by using the correct style of coding we can work to minimise the amount of code used, which will consequently maximise the visibility of your content. We can achieve this by using HTML programming and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Flash websites present a major problem when it comes to search engine optimisation, as Flash cannot be indexed by a search engine in the same way a regular, text based website is. Flash websites are much like images. From our perspective, a picture says a thousand words, however from the perspective of a computer, a picture says one phrase, that which is located in its ALT tag. Try scrolling your mouse over the images on the right. The little pop-up box that displays the text, is the text located in the image's ALT tag. Flash works in a similar way. Therefore, if you want high rankings in search engines, it is much more desirable for you to write out those thousand words rather than putting them in a picture.

Content Management Systems (CMS) can also present a problem for search engines as these websites are dynamic. The content that you see in your browser window does not normally exist as a file on the server. Instead, when your browser requests that particular page, the content is retrieved from a database and the page is contructed on the fly from a template file. It is for this reason that content management systems are much more difficult to gain higher rankings for, when compared to static websites, such as this one. When approached in the correct manner however, a CMS based website can gain as much, if not more visibility than a static website. The main benefit of a CMS based website is that you can control the content on your website through an interface similar to Microsoft Word, without having to rely on your website programmer for updates.

Internal linking structure refers to the way that your website is bound together from page to page. Javascript menus and Flash programming can severely hamper the search engine's efforts to see all the pages on your website. By correctly linking one page to another we can effectively tell the search engine which pages are the most important and which pages fall below these most important pages, much like the structure of a family tree. By doing this, we ensure that the most important content in indexed first, and valued highly, over the less important content.

External linking structure refers to websites that link to you and that you link to from your website. It is very important to link to content which is relevant to yours and vice versa. If the content is not relevant, we can ensure that a search engine will not follow a particular link, and therefore keep all the value within your website.

Content location and the amount of content on your website are also a major factor in search engine optimisation. When a search engine arrives at your site it will scan your site from left to right, top to bottom. Take this site for example, upon arrival a search engine will see the following in order:

1. The image SEMTEK.net
2. The text, "Search Engine Marketing Technology", and "Ahead Of The Rest"
3. The links to the right of that, "Search Engine Marketing", "Graphic Design" and "Web Design"
4. First menu bar
5. Second menu bar
6. This content
7. Latest Projects
8. And finally the footer below.

Out of these items, no. 1, 2 and 3 are very important as they contain the primary keywords - "SEMTEK", "SEM", "Search Engine Marketing", "website visibility", "search engines", "Website Design", "Search engine friendly", "Graphic Design", "Corporate ID", "Stationery" and "Brochure".

The first menu bar (no. 4) is the least important, as it does not contain any keywords in the menu items. The second menu bar (no. 5), however, does contain important keywords and holds more value. This content (no. 6) is very important as it contains a load of keywords and relevant content. Our latest projects (no. 7) are less important than the content, and the footer (no. 8) is the least important.

Arranging all of these aspects so that the most important are viewed first and the least important and viewed last by the search engine will ensure that your website is valued highly when a potential client types a relevant keyword phrase into a search engine.

Your competitors must also be analysed in order to see how well their websites are put together which will determine wether or not they appear higher than you in the search engine listings for relevant keyword phrases.

Your current website ranking must be analysed to determine if your website is visible in the search engines and which pages are missing. We will ensure that all of your pages are indexed by the search engines and we will also make sure that the search engines are aware of which pages on your website are the most relevant.

Contact us for a free analysis of your website.