Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The main objective of Search Engine Optimisation is to get your web site ranking as highly as possible in the search engine results pages (SERPs) using the most appropriate keywords that describe your website content, to drive visitors to your site, and to achieve the business goals of your web site.

We will recommend certain optimisation strategies, coding examples, and best practices, which will improve search engine rankings for keywords and phrases integral to your business goals.

How Do We Do It?

Search Engine Optimisation is all about content. The job of any search engine is to return the most relevant and up-to-date pages in response to a customer's search phrase. Therefore old web pages with outdated and irrelevant content are likely to appear much further down the rankings, than a page with up-to-date and highly relevant content. Keep in mind that page content in King.

Secondly, you need to ensure that your pages are clearly understandable for your visitors and are not full of words and phrases that search engines are likely to see as spam.

Once these two things are taken care of, we can set about sorting out the other 70+ factors that search engines like Google take into account when reviewing your pages.

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"On Page" Factors

The things we can change on a page are known as the "On Page" factors, and relate to:

Your Keywords

The words and phrases selected will be based on the following criteria:

1. Are central to the products or services that your business provides
2. Present an opportunity to become a leader in the word/phrase category
3. Are used in content on your competitor’s web sites
4. Are words and phrases repeated in the page content

Although many keywords may be listed, the amount of content which relates to a keyword or phrase will dictate how much emphasis can be placed on them.

Coding Tactics

Code is the most neglected aspect of search engine optimisation campaigns. Well-written, standards-compliant code makes a site load quickly, and opens it up to search engines.

Code optimisation is part of a successful SEO program; it removes browsing obstacles from users and search engines.

When search engines visit and begin to index a web site, several factors are taken into account with regard to code and rankings:

• Content to code ratio: Search engine spiders want to see the highest possible ratio of content to code.
  
• Code accessibility: Search engine spiders are very simple, and generally fairly standards-dependent. They need standards-compliant code in order to access all areas of a site.
  
• Poor SEO ethics: More advanced search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, look for any attempt to deliver one set of keyword-rich but hard-to-read content to search engines, and another, more people-friendly version to everyone else. When they find this type of search engine spam, they may demote or ban your site. No long-term search engine optimization strategy should employ these kinds of tactics.

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Basic HTML & CSS

To enable search spider indexing the following coding practices will be used:

1. Images: images used to display complex content (graphs/charts), and images used to serve a business need will have alt=”” text describing the image in plain text.
   Not every image will have alternate text. In the cases where alternate text is not needed the alternate text property will be left blank: alt=””
   
2. Navigation elements: will be linked using HTML text rather than graphics. Formatting, colours, and size will be manipulated using CSS.
   
3. Headlines, subheads, and callout text: a hierarchy of importance will be determined and reflected in the code used to communicate the level of importance to the search spider. H1-H4 tags will be used to indicate the importance and relevance of keywords and phrases. Formatting, colours, and size will be manipulated using CSS.
   
4. Bolded Text: Between 1 and 4 instances of keywords and phrases in the body copy will be stylised in bold text to indicate importance and relevance.
   
5. Page Titles: The most important keywords and phrases will be used in the page title in a manner consistent with a naming convention. Page titles will be limited to no more than 5 words.
   
6. Meta Information: Meta name and description tags will be used, the content used to create Meta name and description tags will be based on the page content.
   
7. JavaScript: Any JavaScript code used will be imported from an external .js file and will be created using the proper commenting code to hide it from search engine spiders.
   
8. Site Map: A text-based site map with links to every page site will be created in order to assist a categorical and fast indexing of all pages.

Advanced Coding Practices

To enable the highest degree of search indexing the following development tactics will be employed:

1. Internal Links: Wherever possible, keywords and phrases will be used as links to content on the web site to pages where the keyword or phrase is used in the destination page’s title or headlines and the content is specific to the keyword or phrase being linked.
   
2. File Naming Conventions: pages where the content is very specific to a keyword or phrase will have file name which includes the keyword or phrase.
   Note: Attempts will be made to accomplish this tactic; however, relevant page content will determine the actual naming of the page.

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"Off Page" Factors

The "Off Page" factors relate to the inbound links to your site. An SEO strategy is worthless unless it has a clear policy for creating inbound links to your site from other sites with relevant content. Highly prized are inbound links from .gov or .edu sites, as Google usually places a large amount of credibility on these links.

Link Building

Link Building is not about getting as many incoming links as possbile, but more about getting selected links from quality sites, that offer related or complimentary services to your own. Far better to get half a dozen links from a number of sites with a good Google Page Rank™ ,than to get fifty links from unrelated sites with low Page Ranks.

Anchor Text

The actual text in the hyperlink from another site to your own is very important. This linking text is known as the Anchor Text and is one factor often overlooked by SEO companies.

Try searching for "Click Here" in Google, and you will see that Adobe.com comes out top from over 1.2 Billion results. The reason for this is that millions of sites link back to Adobe with the words "Click Here to download a copy of Acrobat Reader".

Picking the right Anchor Text is therefore very important in a Link Building strategy.

How Much Does it Cost?

Our Basic Search Engine Optimisation Service starts at only £150 per page. For this one off fee we will:

• Investigate your chosen keywords for popularity
• Suggest alternative words/phrases that may be rank highly
• Investigate your top 10 competitors and see how they achieve their ranking
• Create the Meta Keywords tag for the page
• Create the Meta Description tag for the page
• Suggest changes (as required) to your page copy
• Submit your amended pages to the main search engines
• Find appropriate link partners to link back to your site

Why not contact us today to see how our Search Engine Marketing services can help raise your profile in the Search Engine Results Pages.

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