What is Search Engine Optimisation?

I will always design your website in a search engine optimised way and always included in the price. But what is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation can be considered in two parts; On-site Optimisation and Off-site Optimisation.

On-site SEO is a standard of web design that allows search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) to read the contents of your website and therefore display your site to visitors searching on something related to your products or services.

With on-site SEO it is important to use keywords in relevant points in each of your pages : Header tags, image tags, page titles, file names and meta descriptions are all important. This is what I do when designing and coding your site.

Off-site SEO involves creating relevant links from other websites to encourage browsers to come and have a look at your site, this has an added effect of helping to raise your website's ranking. This is not a service i offer personally but I can happily recommend a company to you.

A Search Query Example

If you were running a company that sold pet food then any of the following searches would be relevant to you (to name but a few!)

• Dog Food
• Cat Food
• Pet Health
• Pet Food
• Animal Nutrition
• Pet Food Suppliers

In order for the search engines to know that your company's website is relevant you must ensure these terms appear in all the relevant tags on your page.

Search engines rank pages, not websites

To carry on our pet food example, it is worth noting the importance placed on individual pages of your website. Within our hypothetical Pet Food website we might have separate pages for cat food and dog food and the title, text and image tags will vary between the pages to best describe the content of said pages. When a visitor to one of the search engines searches for "dog food" the results will display your dog food page and not necessarily your home page, this helps you expand the number of different keywords you can associate with your website as a whole.

I’ve heard I need to use metatags?

In days gone by, search engines primarily read a series of keywords that web designers embedded into the code of the websites they designed, these metatags are hidden from public viewing.

This had obvious drawbacks as search results could be extremely unreliable. For example, a company could add “pet food” as a metatag but not have anything to do with pets which became frustrating for visitors trying to find what they wanted.

The more modern programs that search the internet on behalf of the search engines (bots or web bots) have become much more sophisticated and the metatag data has become irrelevant.

Google has once and for all confirmed that the tags have no influence in their search results, in September 2009 a post on their webmasters blog read :

"Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present"

This makes the wording of your copy of paramount importance. This is an area where I can offer help and advice, tailored to each individual. Be wary of designers and SEO "experts" that talk about metatags... they are very much behind the times!

What are header tags?

In each page of your website there are text elements that are ranked in order of importance and are called header tags, running from <h1> to <h6>

You should have only have one <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags but you can have multiple <h4> <h5> and <h6> tags. Using this page as an example the following are set as tags :

• <h1> - What is Search Engine Optimisation?
• <h2> - A Search Query Example.
• <h3> - Search engines rank pages, not websites.
• <h4> - I’ve heard I need to use metatags?
• <h4> - What are header tags?
• <h4> - what are image alt tags?
• <h4> - Are links from other websites important?
• <h4> - Will I be number 1 on Google?
• <h5> - Infographic
• <h6> - Summary

You don't have to have that many headers on the page but you should at least have a <h1> and <h2> tags.

What are image alt tags?

The programs that trawl and index the internet cannot (as yet!) tell what an image or picture is. As a designer it is my job to write a description of the image into the code. This is another important way of getting more keywords into your website.

Using this page as an example again, the image of the infographic (top right) has an image alt tag of "How Google Works". A description of the image as well containing keywords and terms.

Are links from other websites important?

Now we delve into the world of off-site SEO.

Whilst it is true that search engines look at how many websites link to you, these must be relevant links from relevant websites. If you artificially promote your website through link farms, link exchanges etc. you run the risk of being penalised and even blacklisted by the search engines.

The best links are often from Trade Associations that you are a member of or on manufacturers websites that you are suppliers for, this will vary from company to company so the advice I will offer is tailored to your company‘s needs.

There is also great merit in registering your website on places such as "Google Local Business", "Yell.com" and "FreeIndex" (to name but a few) as visitors to search engines often want to find business in their local area.

Will I be number 1 on Google?

The short answer is "maybe" and don’t expect it overnight. To climb up the ranking on all the search engines can take time and effort and lots of factors are involved such as the frequency in which you add new content to your website.

Again using "Dog Food", if you were to write articles and add news stories to your website on a regular basis you both attract repeat visits and grow your website meaning more keywords are seen by the search engine programs the next time they swing past.

A good example of this is the article you a re reading now. It hopefully helps you, the reader, to understand the jargon heavy world of SEO. It will also be indexed by the search engines so visitors querying terms like "what are metatags?" will stumble upon this article and maybe then decide to give me a call on 01622 205130 to discuss their website needs!

Every case is different and I only recommend legitimate SEO companies that will work in partnership with you to develop the strategy that's right for your business. They are the same people I use and the chances are you have found me via a search engine, so they must be doing something right!

Summary

It can be a daunting task setting up a new site or overhauling an existing one and expert advice and opinion can ease the burden. As a small (but talented!) business every client is valuable to me and I like to think I can offer that little bit extra advice and help. I don’t charge for enquiries so please get in touch!

Thanks for reading!