How best to get your site to the top of the search rankings
You've read the rest of the site and you're convinced that SEO is essential to your business success, but you want to know more about how it will work so you are sure you're getting value for money and not getting the wool pulled over your eyes.
How will we optimise your site?
There are four main areas to consider when approaching a site to be optimised:
- Keyword analysis and choice
- Technical considerations with the coding of the site and with the server
- Content - the text on the site and how it is complemented by the meta-information
- The link profile - internal linking and also links pointing to and from the site
Keyword Analysis
Choosing what search terms to optimise for is a key part of the process. You need to make sure that the terms your site is important for are ones that will bring you useful targeted traffic. It's possible to check which terms are being searched for and how popular they are so the first thing we do is look at the words and phrases that people are likely to use when searching for your subject or products and establish which ones will be useful to optimise for. We then need to make sure that there are enough pages in the site to cover all the terms that we decide to go for (in agreement with you) and choose the best pages to optimise for each phrase.
Coding and Technical Matters
Next we'll consider how well the site has been coded. Is it valid HTML?, if not how serious are the errors and could they be stopping the search engines from efficiently indexing your pages. We'll look at whether it's advisable to recode the site to eradicate the errors, and further, whether it would be useful to overhaul the coding in such a way that it has the least amount of code necessary to display the site as intended. The less code the spiders have to wade through to get to the text the better the chances of it being indexed. It may also be possible to have the text near the top of the code with other less important sections being below it. Javascript will be externalised and in-line style commands will be centralised in a CSS file, helping to further reduce code bloat and making site-wide changes in styling much easier to execute.
We'll also look at the navigation systems and make sure they are capable of being followed by search spiders. If they aren't then we'll either replace them with ones that are or we'll install alternative methods such as plain text links in a footer or a site map.
We'll look at the server configuration and whether it's providing the right response headers.
Text Content and Meta Information
We'll assess whether there are enough pages in your site and whether there is enough text on your pages in order to be seen as important for the search terms you are looking for. If not we'll suggest new pages and/or new text. We'll rewrite existing text where necessary to include the important search terms in sufficient density to make them important while still reading well for the site's visitors, and we'll structure the text with relevant headers, subheaders, and lists. Once this is done we'll match the page's title tag, meta description tag, and keywords tag to the new text.
In the case of a database driven site we may be able to recode the site so that some pages (product pages are an obvious example) have their meta-tags optimised automatically.
Link Profiles
We'll look at how your site is connected internally to make sure it works efficiently for both user and search spider. We'll also look at your external links - to see that you aren't linking to any unethical sites which may be bad for you - and to see who is linking to you and whether you need to try and get more links. Where advisable we'll register your site with relevant directories and suggest related sites which can be approached to request reciprocal links that will be of benefit to both your sets of users.
We don't undertake old fashioned link campaigns - partly because they are very labour intensive, and partly because the nature of Google's approach to links means that in order to be successful they must be carried out gradually and maintained over the long term rather than the old method. We therefore believe that this is something that should ideally be handled by the client themselves in an ongoing fashion and we will happily advise on this and install link request pages on clients' sites.