Website Design Process - (5) Search Engine Optimisation
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Search Engine Optimisation
You probably know about search engines – maybe you arrived at this site using one. A search engine enables people to search for items of interest by typing in keywords describing the information they are looking for.
Which search terms do you wish to be found for when people make searches using search engines? These are your keywords.
The people who land on your site as a result of a search engine search are highly important to you. Their search will have involved keywords that relate to the products and services on your website, in other words, they will have been looking for you. This is known as 'targeted traffic'.
Search engine optimisation is the process of writing and designing a website in such a way as to take full advantage of how search engines gather their information, therefore generating targeted traffic.
Search engine optimisation all centres on keywords. We will research your keywords carefully and build your web pages around them. Then, when someone searches for your keywords, your website will hopefully come up in a prominent place in the search results.
We say hopefully because search engine optimisation can be a tricky business. Different search engines apply different rules of logic to determine where to place a website in their listings. Thus, you may do well in one search engine and not so well in another.
We'd like to say 'we guarantee top search engine positions' but we don't make promises we can't keep. The reason for this is there are other factors that can influence where you appear in search results, such as inbound links to your website from other websites, and the number of websites in your business sector competing for the same keywords.
However, we are confident the strategies we employ when we design and code your website will help give you a fighting chance (and we assure you they are all above board)! What's more, you don't pay extra for this, it's included in the design price so you have nothing to lose.
A word about Google
Google is the nation's (and indeed the world's) favourite search engine. Everyone wants their website to achieve a high position on Google. Indeed, it is currently the most popular search engine - followed by the other big players, MSN (which can sometimes produce more relevant results) and Yahoo.
The important thing to remember is that traffic sent your way from any search engine (not just the most popular ones) is just as significant as traffic coming from Google.
Here are the search engine results we had in March with one of our websites (correct as of 19-03-08):
www.healthwriter.co.uk - positions for keywords 'Health Writer' and 'Freelance Health Writer' respectively in 27 search engines.
| Alexa (1) (5) All The Web (1) (1) Altavista (5) (1) Altavista UK (5) (1) AOL (1) (1) AOL UK (1) (1) Ask Jeeves (1) (1) Ask Jeeves UK (3) (1) DogPile (6) (6) Euroseek (12) (30) Excite (4) (3) Google (1) (1) * Google UK (2) (1) * |
Ixquick (1) (1) Lycos (11) (33) Lycos UK (1) (1) Mamma (1) (1) Metacrawler (5) (3) MSN (1) (1) MSN UK (1) (1) Search.com (7) (5) Tiscali UK (1) (1) Webcrawler (12) (8) Yahoo (3) (1) * Yahoo UK (1) (1) * |
Please note: These are the positions for organic listings, not paid for listings that appear at the top as sponsored results.
Stay tuned for next month when we will show you the search engine results for a different website.
Previous search engine results »
If after some weeks of going live your website is still struggling in the search engine stakes, we can discuss ways of making improvements with you. It's not in our interest for your site not to make it into the listings - we want it to do well as much as you do.
Testing and payment
As you will have already agreed on the website design before the HTML and search engine optimisation processes there should not be any surprises about how the site looks when it is finished, but if you do decide you would like to make some changes at the end it may be possible (depending on what they are).
Your website is thoroughly tested to check it is working properly. Any problems will be rectified before it goes live. When you have agreed everything is satisfactory we will request payment of the full balance. You will own copyright of your website once you have paid in full.
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