Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Improving your position in searches on Google and other search engines.At Web Design & Mastery we only use traditional, honest methods to achieve good search engine placement, looking at the long term rather than a quick boost. We believe it is more important to get appropriate and well targetted traffic than large numbers of hits from people who will not buy your services.
There are various ways to improve search engine placement. Some of these will fall to us - others will need your input.
What we do
Firstly, we will check your website's performance with Google Webmaster Tools - this will tell us how well it's been doing up til now, and whether there are any problems with the site which stop it accessing or indexing your pages effectively. These are corrected right away.Next begins our thorough check of all your pages. We will ensure that your website is built with valid, appropriate code, and that it is fully accessible to all user groups.
The reason for this is that Google will expect certain HTML tags to be used for specific purposes and will weight the content accordingly, so it's crucial that these tags are included, and used correctly. As for accessibility - well, if the website is designed to be accessible to all, this will make it easier for Google's robots to retrieve the content from your website. After all, Google is just a text-only browser! So improved accessibility will ensure that no content is lost.
We will embed appropriate key words into your website, which Google will then use to index your site. Therefore we will ask you for ten to twenty words or short phrases that you expect people to use when looking for your site in a search engine. We can provide examples of suitable key words, but ultimately nobody knows your business as well as you do, so it's best if you can think of the key words yourself. We will also ask you for a twenty word description of your business; this will be the wording displayed by Google when your site comes up in search listings.
Finally, we can add a Sitemap file. This is different to a sitemap provided for your users - it's a special file intended to be read by Google, and it lists every single page in your website. It will help Google in the process of visiting and indexing your website, and means that Google can quickly pick up on any changes made.
What you need to do
With our job done, it falls to you to help with the search engine placement of your website:- Have useful content on your site
- Keep your site updated
- Get respected and popular sites to link to you
It should be obvious why you need useful content on your site; if there is little to see, the site will not be ranked highly. If there is content but it is not unique (i.e. there are hundreds of sites with the same text) you cannot expect to rank higher than other similar sites. Try to find something unique and interesting that you can add to your website which will attract traffic, and perhaps after reading it, people will buy your services. For example if you are a restaurant, why not add an unusual recipe, or a description of how to fold napkins or decorate a dining room? If you are a tradesman, why not add a "Doctor's Surgery" where you describe the common complaints and how to take care of your house or garden from day to day? Adding "tricks of the trade" or "tips" will not only drive extra traffic to your website, but they will be relevant visitors who could well become customers. So, take the time to write some extra, unique and interesting content.
Keep your site updated! If your site is published once, and then left alone, it will slowly fall down the rankings as Google perceives that it has been left to rot. This can easily be counteracted with regular updates - why not combine this with the concept of providing useful content by adding regular "top tips" or newsletters? This will also keep your customers returning to your website to see what's new, and at the very least this will keep your name in their mind - at best it will encourage them to buy from you when they wouldn't otherwise. It's easy to keep your site updated, just see our maintenance section.
Finally, ask people to link to you. Swap links with sites that can be useful to you (for example if you are a painter and decorator you could link to a good builders company, they in return could link back to you) and email your contacts asking if they will place a link on their website. Google will increase your page ranking if you have a link from other pages that it rates highly.
Remember that it can take a couple of months after submitting the site to a search engine, before you start seeing fruit from it. We typically find with Google it can take a month before they trawl the site, and another month before your site is indexed and appearing in the search results. Unfortunately you will have to be patient, but once the search engines have indexed your site, any changes to your content should be picked up more quickly. For that reason, if you are not able to provide all the content at one time, we suggest that a basic site goes online as soon as possible, with further pages to follow when you are ready.
If, at any point after your site goes live, you feel you are not getting enough traffic, please get in touch - we can provide a free consultation and some ideas on how we could improve your site's popularity and value.
"We are really delighted with our new website. Flash was extremely fast, friendly and helpful all the way through the process and went to great lengths to get the website just as we wanted. As complete novices to the world of website design, we were grateful to have a person who made the task run so smoothly.
Thank you very much!"
[Hackney Family Backup]
[Hackney Family Backup]
"Thank you so much for all your hard work on my behalf; you very quickly grasped the image I wanted to portray. I am really pleased with the website that was delivered earlier than I expected and on budget. Your extensive knowledge of websites and the legislation that affects them is impressive and led to a level of detail that I was not expecting. I literally could not have done it without you. It has been a real pleasure working with Web Design & Mastery."
[Kate Fishpool Associates]
[Kate Fishpool Associates]