Search Engine Optimisation

You hear this term all the time - ‘SEO’ - it is looked upon by many with suspicion, or as dark and complicated art that can only be done by highly-paid specialists. The fact is, while SEO is multi- faceted and you can become easily obsessed about every last detail of your website to make it Google-friendly, just by ensuring you follow a few simple practises, you can become SEOoptimised and Google-friendly without much fuss.

SEO Explained

In the good ol’ days (I’m talking around 2002 here!) all you needed to do to get to the top of search engines was to build a website crammed with keywords and search terms and then try link out to everyone on the planet. While having a selection of great keywords in your page is still very important - old-fashioned practises such as ‘keyword stuffing’ or joining link farms will actually now get you a lower ranking on Google.

How To SEO In Today’s World

Google is clever. Very clever. It will know when you try to cheat it so don’t even bother. It is better to simply follow the two main rules of modern SEO - have a quality, standards-compliant, SEO-optimised website and then write good content for it. Remember - search engines are text driven, Flash content is bad, and images are not as important as meaningful content text.

Getting The Website Ready For SEO

If you do not have a website or are looking to upgrade your existing website, it is very important to make sure the site is built from the ground up to be W3C code compliant, and SEO-optimised. This means making sure your sitemap is properly formed, ‘SEO friendly’ URLs are used, and titles and headers make the best use of keywords. Also ensure that social networking is hooked up and creating backlinks to your site, and making sure your site isn’t doing stuff that could damage the site’s ranking (which frankly in 2012 is quite a lot). All our websites are SEO optimised as standard, but if your existing site isn’t working well on Google, we can help.

Author: Andy Skraga