Search Engine Promotion
By making your website as search engine friendly as possible you stand a far greater
chance of climbing up the ranking results ladder, thus winning more traffic and
increasing sales and enquires. Around 80% of your new visitor traffic will come
from search engines, if your site performs badly in these search engines the consequences
to visitor numbers can be severe.
Many optimisation companies will present search engine optimisation as some mystical
black art that requires Zen like mastery and a huge sacrifice, usually money!
However, it isn't that complicated, search engines want to present their users
with information pertinent to the search term entered by that user. The best way
to attract search engine traffic is by having lots of relevant information relating
to what the searcher is looking for. Our Search Engine Optimisation follow this
ethos and try and work with the search engines rather than against them.
First Golden Rule
So, it turns out the 1st golden rule of your website is "Content"
The more content your website has on a subject the more "search terms"will be contained within that textual content.
If you sell widgets, and you have 100 pages dedicated to information about widgets as opposed to a site that sells widgets but
only has 1 page of information your website will vastly out perform the other in the search engines. In a simple form this works
because it is much more likely that the searcher entered a term such as "cheap blue widgets" and with 100 pages of content
is much more likely that these terms will appear in your website as opposed to a site with one page, and as such you will be ranked
higher in the Google rankings. If you then apply this to the potential 1000's of possible search terms that could be used to
find widgets, "Used Widgets, Widgets in Yorkshire, New condensed purple shelled widgets, etc etc" In all likelihood your
website with its 100 pages of content about widgets is much more likely to contain these terms, and so get presented well in the
rankings.
Second Golden Rule
The second golden rule is making sure that all that wonderful content is available to search engines to browse.
Many websites employ complex navigation systems, such as JavaScript or flash driven
drop down navigations, these look wonderful but unless deployed with a secondary
HTML driven navigation Google never finds these pages and pages of content and so
treats your website like the 1 page website.
Third Golden Rule
The 3rd rule is poorly formatted HTML and page structure.
Most search engines grade the quality of the page you present, lots of broken links
and images will score your site badly. Most search engines treat the text nearer
the top of the page as having more relevance that information at the bottom of a
page, so ideally the page structure needs to have the textual content about your
website closer to the top, and any styling and control code lower down the page.
Fourth Golden Rule
The 4th rule is strong external links.
If another website has a link to your website, search engines tend to treat this
as a vote in favour of your website, the more links you have incoming the more votes
your website has for it. A lesser known fact is that the websites you link to also
effect this voting. If you have lots of links that the search engine think link
to quality websites you will gain points, if you have lots of links to websites
the search engines think are poor, or breaking their guidelines, your website will
be penalised accordingly. So you have to think about who links to you and who you
link to.