Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO )

"How do I get my website to the top of the search engines?"

Search engine optimisation is one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet. The race to achieve high positions in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo is a never ending one. It is also becoming increasingly competitive as companies look to reach those looking for their services using search engines.

The answer is, "Not simply." The rules change daily and what was an acceptable technique for boosting your rankings yesterday is now "Spamming and likely to result in your site bing dropped from the database altogether and there are great chunks of the web devoted to optimising your site for each individual search engine.

At DYNAMIC-eDESIGN, we thought long and hard about offering a full Search Engine Placement (SEP) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) service separately from our website design service. Building web pages that are optimised for search engines needs to be done at design time to get the best results. For this reason we do not offer the SEO service to non DYNAMIC-eDESIGN designed sites. When we build your website for you we can build in search engine functionality, just ask us for details.

The webpages we build for you can be search-engine ready - as our car builders will help the salesman by building a car that performs well and looks great inside and out rather than making it look great from a distance but then giving it a khaki, velour interior with tacky, poor quality plastic fixtures.

Things that we will do, and that you can do yourself, to better your sites position without paying highrankings.com $100 a month (plus a fixed $1000 dollar optimisation fee) include:

Use the title tag

The most commonly wasted attribute to any web page is the title. Usually reading, Our Homepage or similar, the title tag is one of the places the search engines typically look to match searches and so should be much more descriptive: DYNAMIC-eDESIGN Low Cost Effective Web Design. It shouldn't just be a list of keywords though, it should make sense to anyone that reads it and be between 40 and 50 characters long.

Use meta tags

What? Meta tags?

Meta tags are another useful addition to your site that are pasred by some search engines. The two most important ones are description and keywords. Description should be a brief description of you or your site and what you do - why people should choose you over the others in the list. It can be up to 255 charcters long but try and make it punchy without being a list of words. It should read clearly.

The keywords are exactly what they say they are: a list of words associated with your site. Make this list up of all the things that you do, the areas you cover and the products that you sell. There are useful tools on the internet for finding keywords that you hadn't thought of. Try Wordtracker, Overture and Adwords. Don't make this list too long and too general in the hope of grabbing any passing trade, basically what you are doing is saying that your site isn't specific to your market. Consider two stores next to each other a small DIY tool store and a huge DIY megastore. If you want a range of products you might go to the megastore, if you only want a hammer it will be quicker and easier for you to go to the smaller tool store.

Another poor move is to use the same keywords on every page in your site. Look at it this way, do supermarkets put every product in every row or do they group them to help the customer find what they are looking for simply? Okay, let me rephrase that, do MOST supermarkets...

Think of your website as store of separate aisles, rather than one big, wide aisle and help your customers find what they want quickly and easily.

Text on your page

You need to have standard text on your page for the search engines to read. Make sure you use key words in your text that state what the page is about. Match the text with the keywords meta tag. If your keywords Meta Tag has the words search, engine and optimistation then make sure that is what the page is about and those words are visible on the web page. Doing this will give your page a higher search engine ranking.

And the best thing you can do?

Optimise your page copy. Seriously, copy is your best friend. Try and make sure that every page has at least 150 words of useful copy on it. Add pages to your site to increase your copy content: tips, hints, how-tos and so on. Not only will these be of interest to your readers but other pages can also link to them, increasing your page ranking by increasing your number of external, inbound links.

Once again, make sure that you are using the words in your keyword list - especially in headers if possible - and that you complete the alt tag of every image with a suitable description. If a keyword fits, USE IT! Avoid long lists of keywords in your copy though - are they really likely to be of interest to your reader? Even worse, the search engines can detect it and view it as spam.

Interested in search engine optimisation?

We believe that for your website to reach your target audience SEO needs to be carried out, even at basic level. Failure to do so will mean that your site will become virtually invisible. Contact Dynamic e-Design to find out how our optimisation of your website can improve your visibility and your bottom line.

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