Search Engine Optimisation
Search OptimisationWhy is Search so important?
So how did your website end up in their results?Search engines run little programs (called ‘spiders’) that ‘read’ every webpage they can find and then send a copy of the text back to headquarters where it is sorted and added to huge databases (called ‘indexing’). The amount of times a spider will visit is dependent on how often you update information on your site and how popular it is – but usually you can expect a visit every few weeks. As you can see from the graph, it is IMPERATIVE that your web designer does everything that they can to ensure that your website information is accessible to search engines because the vast majority of your traffic depends upon it. Well, believe it or not - MOST WEB AGENCIES DONT! They will include ‘basic’ tags that allow your pages to be found, but most of them leave a thorough optimisation till a requested future date. They will argue that design and optimisation are two separate processes and skills – which is true – but one is pointless without the other in my opinion. At IPO Digital Design you can be assured that every effort is taken to optimise site content right from the first design so that your site gets indexed correctly straight from the first search visit. Ongoing SEO (discussed in the ‘background’ tab above) can be arranged, and I am also happy to carry out an ‘Optimisation Analysis’ of existing websites. BackgroundWhen you first approach a website design company seeking a suitable internet representation of your business, the main directives you’ll endeavour to recreate online are the visual recognition of the branding you have achieved through traditional marketing, and a suitable ‘look and feel’ that will appeal to your target audience. Notice how all of these design factors are based around visual imagery – and since the design company isn’t usually responsible for the adding or sorting of content, what you’ll end up with is what you were seeking... a professional looking website that does an excellent job of representing your company to ‘would-be’ online clients. The problem comes about 6-12 months after the site has launched when you notice a steady but consistent decline in site traffic (visitors). What’s wrong with the site? Should we change the design, or maybe add a few new pages? Both of these options may help a little, but what your website is really suffering from is ‘post-new’ syndrome. When your site first appeared on the internet, search engines gave it a high ranking because it was ‘new and fresh’, but after a short period of time it loses it’s gloss and then needs to rely on SEO techniques to keep it listed ‘high’ in search engine results pages. What is SEO?Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a term used to describe the ‘profession’ of helping websites rank well in search engines. SEO is not ‘usability’ (which is the study of how a website can build ‘trust’), but instead is the ongoing task of updating and fine-tuning your individual website pages to attract traffic for search ‘terms’ relating to information on those pages.
After awhile however, other companies would see how well you were doing, so they would all buy orange cars too, and pink ones, and yellow ones, and lime green ones until eventually not only your message, but all messages would be lost in a blur of conflicting imagery. How then would people find your message? They would have to ask a traffic officer, who sees all the traffic regularly, which car they thought had the best message about ‘sausages’. They would have to trust that this officer was both impartial in their judgment, but also unable to be fooled easily. And since the officer can only see the message on the outside of the car – the ‘message’ itself becomes everything. Not the graphical appeal or the colour of the car, or the size of the logo - just the textual content of your site. A good-looking site will keep customers, but only good content will attract new ones. So what affects SERP ranking?Search engines deploy very complex programs that visit websites and try to read them (called ‘indexing’) as though they were people, and because there is so much similar information on the internet, they will compare your website with similar sites and then ‘rate’ their visit based on a whole range of criteria (most of which are known but some are kept secret by individual search companies). So, rather obviously, the 2 most important factors in your upgraded website redesign are to make sure that search engines can get in (no frames or navigation links inside flash as these will stop programs in their tracks), and that when they do, there’s something for them to find – loads of relevant, clear, concise, and detailed, contextual text about your business. An image might say a thousand words to a real person, but to a search robot (called a ‘spider’) they mean nothing unless they have a suitable alt tag describing the contents of the image. When a person goes to a search engine and types a search request (e.g. ‘ham flavoured sausages’), in order for your site to rank highly there must be a page, or multiple pages, that contain that text. If your page about that term contains a graphical header then a spider has no way of knowing how important that term is – even though the whole page is about that subject. So the third item on our checklist is ‘structured mark-up’. Your website must be written in a language that offers no barriers to a spider and actually ‘helps out’ by alerting the spiders to what is important information. This is why HTML (the language your webpage is written in) has heading tags (H1 through to H6) and title tags and bold tags. Your website should be ‘standards compliant’ and able to be ‘validated’ by a validation service, and it should use CSS to keep tags that relate to presentation away from the search engines, exposing your content. Websites written by inexperienced programmers can place many barriers to search engines behind the scenes, whilst still remaining visually appealing to a browser. There are a whole raft of page structure redesign disciplines where restructuring, and renaming standard HTML tags correctly is known to dramatically increase search engine ranking, but the next item on our list comes from outside your area of influence - linkage. If people like your website, and find the information there useful and informative, they may choose to place a link on their websites to yours – and vice versa. This ‘linkage’ chain can do wonders for your website ranking, since a search engine is intelligent enough to see that both sites deal with the same subject and therefore must be maintained by people interested in helping the public with that subject. They build their own ranking system of ‘popularity’ of a site based on how many people link to your site and how many people in turn linked to the referring site. Since it is a human choice to link to your site, a search engine has to accept that therefore there must be something worthwhile on it. ConclusionThere are no fast routes to becoming the ‘number one’ search result for a given term, but there are some very important steps that can be taken to ensure that your site ranks well. There are many different search engines, and each of them uses different ranking criteria to decide their results, so the most sensible option is to ensure that you have a website that contains lots of content, is structured well to enable both people and spiders to read the site, and that your site contains both incoming and out-going links to similar sites. There are many other forms of advertising (like Google ad words, search index submissions, sitemaps etc) that will accelerate the ranking process, but for them to prove valuable your site must already have met this criteria. TechniquesSearch Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short) can be broken down into three main types based on the amount of time you are prepared to invest in achieving higher traffic results. Basic SEOAll websites should have these attributes as a bare minimum.
This is the bare minimum required for search engines to be able to index site pages and for an historical record of reader behaviour to begin recording for future analysis. Intermediate SEOThis is the type of SEO service that most clients require if their website is a convenience service to an existing business process. This will serve to drive interested traffic to your website and build up your online customer base.
These methods are all designed to refine your site’s content and bring it into line with what readers are searching for. This will also ensure that there is a reason for readers to return to your site and begin the process of customer loyalty. Advanced SEO (Campaigns)If your business is solely reliant for revenue on your website, then you need to invest large amounts of time and research into driving traffic to your site, giving them what they need, and rewarding them for choosing you.
These are all expensive, but proven, methods of driving traffic to your website that has indicated through searching behaviour that they might be interested in your products or services, and then keeping them as customers through a reward system. Most of these techniques are very complex and require time to bear fruit and an ongoing commitment to ensure success. |
Have a look at the chart that displays the average source of website traffic for most sites. The vast majority of visitors to any website are arriving as a result of search behaviour – meaning that they first visited a search engine (like 
Imagine, if you would, an example of owning the only orange car in your town or city. Everyone would notice you and see whatever message you painted on the outside of your new car. If you were selling ‘sausages’ you would have a ‘monopoly of awareness’ with whomever you drove past.
