Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Google

The most common question we hear is: "Can you get our web-site to the top of Google"?

With over 70% market share, Google is our clients main focus but we don't forget the other major search engines. Yahoo, MSN (now Bing), Ask et cetera are all important players.

Let's begin by considering what the purpose of search engines is: to use keywords or phrases to identify relevant information. We design our web-site content and provide our SEO work based on this. We provide web-sites that have quality, relevant and valid content, we look at the keywords and phrases that will be typed using keyword research, we then tailor the content to include these without loss or compromise of reading. Pretty simple really!

Many SEO companies make impossible claims to get you on the front page of Google and often they bully or cheat their way up, usually not reaching the top, using underhand methods and tricks, converting your coherent website into nonsense links and broken sentences. Essentially your website becomes nothing more than spam! What's more, Google look for indications of this and once identified, they take action like removing your site from their index and barring you from their crawl.

Needless to say, we don't do the above! So let's talk about what we actually do...

"White Hat" methods we use to improve your web-site presence

• Search engine submission to the major search engines.
• We add relevant keywords, titles and descriptions (hidden META information that search engines read but aren't shown).
• We build sites with descriptive URLs/page addresses E.g. www.herbs.com/how-to-grow-oregano.html.
• We ensure the page content matches the META information and page addresses.
• We use text links that both humans and search engines can follow.
• We understand every line of code written so we add all the relevant tags to be SEO friendly.
• Making accessible sites (to people with disabilities and low speed connections).
• We add XML Google sitemaps so no page is missed when Google crawls your web-site.
• We use keyword research tools (provided by Google) to see hits and relevance of terms.
• We look at the content of your competition to analyse why they do well and how we can do better.

So... will this get our web-site to the top of Google? The honest answer is maybe, we can't promise it will, however, we've seen every single one of the web-sites we've worked on rise within the search engines but there are so many variables it is impossible to say how quickly a site will rise, if we can get to the home page and so forth. A determining factor is often the strength of competition in your particular market, E.g. a web-site for a taxidermist would be significantly easier to get to page one than a web-site for celebrity gossip. What we can promise though, is that we'll do our best!

Worthwhile reading and SEO references:

• Want to be informed? Check out Googles own starter guide (PDF). Better put the kettle on!
• Essential information written by Google themselves, including avoiding unethical SEO.
• A blog offering three very useful SEO tips