Search Engine Optimization

Many people regard Search Engine Optimization as a complete mystery - including many web designers. SEO, for short, has always been regarded as a separate function of the design process in the same way as web development has. The once-distinct demarcation lines are now becoming blurred, however, as a new breed of designer/developer emerges, and the latest change is the designer/SEO practitioner.

But what exactly constitutes SEO and how is it done? We attempt to explain here:

What is it?

In the simplest terms it means making your website friendly to search engines so that it can be found easily, usually as close to the top of the list as possible. This is because although there are thousands of people searching the Internet, there are thousands of websites out there competing for their attention. Humans are essentially lazy; if we have to think too much, or click too far we don't bother - we just go to the next one. So a position in Google at number 5,723 out of 21 million pages isn't going to do you or your potential visitor much good.

How can it be changed?

There are quite a lot of things we can do to improve matters, but the Golden Rule is that the site should be built for humans not search engines. Search engines are not our target market. Having said that, a site has to be pretty special if it is going to appear on the first page of results based just on its content alone, so, just like mother nature, we give a little help sometimes.

Metadata

You may have heard the terms metadata or metatags bandied about but not been sure what they mean. All websites have an invisible element called metadata; this is a piece of code that communicates with search engine 'spiders' - little robots that crawl through the Internet and report back to the database (search engine) with their findings. A lot of this data is now routinely ignored by search engines because in the past people have tried to exploit it, but not all of it. So we make sure that the metatags that matter are correct.

Keywords

In order to appear near the top of the list, you have to know what people are searching for. If you use the wrong phrase, all your efforts will be wasted because no one will find you. Now, you can guess what people are searching for - not a great idea - or you can find out. We find out by using sophisticated software to measure the number of times a particular search has been made and the number of other websites competing for visitors. This means that sometimes the most obvious keywords are not the best choice because there is too much competition for them. Typing "web design" in Google, for example, produces 2,230,000,000 results, whereas "best internet marketing tips" only returns 13,600,000 - still a heck of a lot, but a heck of a lot less! One of the most important metatags is the page Title - this is the first thing a search engine will look for so getting your keyword included in it is very important. The description tag and image "alt" tags should also include keywords and they should be sprinkled through the body text as well. And that's just the beginning...

Linking

With the best will in the world all SEO techniques will make a small difference to the ranking position of your website, but if you want a big difference, you have to have links. Links to other sites are like votes cast for yours; the more you have, and the better the quality they are, the higher yours will get. If you can persuade websites with a high page rank in Google to link to yours, even better. Yours will be seen as an authority site and its visibility will improve accordingly.

Netresult has plenty of experience in this field. We have thoroughly researched the practice of building web pages that are immediately visible to search engines, and by taking the decision to use CSS to seperate content from layout (see our web design page for details), we improve the process even further. We also have an impressive range of specialist software created to maximise the optimization process, including Wordtracker,™ SEO Elite,™ and IBP. ™

For further details of our SEO services please visit our sister site, SimplySEO.