How Can Your Site Achieve Good Search
Engine Ranking?
The most heavily used search engine is Google. A large amount of analysis has
been done on the way it operates, and what causes sites to do well in Google.
So, what causes sites to appear high up in the list of returned results from a
search?
1. Content
The most important thing is to have good content. Google likes sites which
have relevant textual content - the more, the better.
2. Links
After content, the most important thing is to arrange for other sites to link
to your site. In general, the more sites that link to yours, the better.
However, Google counts the quality of the sites as well as the quantity.
Important, high quality sites count for far more than low quality sites. Indeed,
a link from a "suspect" site may have a negative effect. In addition, it is
better to have one link from a related topic site than many from unrelated
sites. The precise nature of those links is also crucial.
3. Site technical aspects
If your site uses framesets, Google will not be able to see most of your site,
unless care has been taken to put optimisations in place in your pages
specifically to address the problem. Your site's navigation technology should be
such that search engines can find all of your site. Text within images,
JavaScript and Flash are all invisible to search engines and cannot contribute
to achieving a good position for your site. The same can apply to Active Server
pages, product descriptions generated from a database and other dynamic pages.
Your pages should have an appropriate level of keyword density, using your
chosen keywords. Particular meta-tag and attribute usage is very important, and
deprecated usage can have a negative effect.
Read more about
how web design can affect search engine rankings.
Getting Highly Targeted Visitors
We know both from research and our own experience that most search engine users
don't look any further than the first page or two or the search engines'
results. So if your site doesn't appear there, then search engine
optimisation
is certainly called for.
According to research by Pew/Internet and by GVU, close to 85% of web
users use search engines to find web sites. On any given day on-line,
more than half those using the Internet use search engines. And more
than two-thirds of Internet users say they use search engines at least a
couple of times per week. Some 87% of search engine users say they find
what they want most of the time when they use search engines.
So, given this high usage and acceptance by consumers, search engine
optimisation is a very cost effective way indeed of getting visitors
to come to your site.
And these visitors are pre-qualified, highly-targeted visitors. They
have sought you out.
Search Engine Optimisation Competition
The magazine .net commissioned an article about Search Engine
Optimisation techniques, and a centrepiece of this was a competition
between six SEO companies. Read
about how we were listed first.
Our Search Engine Optimisation Services
We offer Search Engine Optimisation Services.
There are two options:
- Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy Services, where we analyse
your site and propose changes to it that you can implement
- Search Engine Optimisation Development Services, where we redevelop
your site ourselves
Our Search Engine Optimisation Services include:
- Researching the keywords people use when searching for sites similar to
yours
- Determining which are the optimal keywords and which pages should be
optimised towards which keywords
- Proposing or making changes to text, meta-data, attributes and navigation
types used on your website, to make it more likely to be found when searched
for using the chosen keywords
- Optimising framesets and other problem areas when needed
- Restructuring and refining your existing content
- Developing additional content-rich pages
- Developing an effective link strategy campaign
If you'd like our help, or more information, please
contact us.
Getting To the Top of the Search Engines' Listings
There is a lot of competition amongst businesses to get to the top of the
search engines' free listings, which is why it is also worth considering paid
listings. These can be surprisingly inexpensive - partly because the leading
search engine companies charge you only when someone clicks on your ad.
A recent Piper Jaffray study* found that search advertising is
still the most cost-effective method of advertising (and at a fraction of the
cost of direct mail, email, online banners or yellow pages).
Please see our
website promotion page for more details
* U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, New Methods in Search Marketing:
Contextual Advertising and Other Evolutions (Safa Rashtchy), June 2004.
There are some search engine optimisation companies who use very
aggressive marketing and attempt to manipulate search engine results in ways
which the search engine vendors do not approve of. Some of these practices are
useless, some will actually reduce your ranking and others may result in your
site being removed entirely from search engines' listings.
We do not do any of the following:
- Guarantee a number one ranking within Google general search results.
No-one can guarantee this. (See Search Engine
Companies - Can You Trust Them? for more info).
- Create deceptive or misleading content
- Offer "free-for-all" links and link popularity schemes which can be
counter-productive
- Offer submission to thousands of search engines which are rarely
used, and which can result in spam
- Offer to re-submit your site to search engines every few days, weeks
or months - which is unnecessary
- Offer the ability for users to type keywords into the browser
address bar
- Promise to rank you highly in search engines but place you in the
advertising section rather than in the general search results, without
making the distinction clear
- Create "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using
deceptive redirects
- Put hidden links to other clients in doorway pages!
- Get traffic from obscure search engines or spyware
- Guarantee ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you
would get anyway
- Use hidden or "cloaked" text
- Send you spam
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