Search Engine Optimisation

"If you build it, they will come". Erm...actually mate, that's not strictly true.

Once your website is built, you want people to visit it. You'll put your web address on your business cards and stationary, include it on your email footer and you might even get it sign-written your vehicle. But, the bulk of your visitors will probably come through referrals from other websites - predominantly, search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is the art of making your website rank well in the search engines for the keywords and keyphrases you want it to.

There are companies who specialise purely in SEO and will offer a vast range of content services across the entire scope of the internet to help improve your ranking.

Here a Bicester Web Design, we recognise that high level SEO is best left to the specialists (we can recommend some to you if necessary), so we ensure that all the technical and structural basics are in place to provide a solid foundation for any future SEO work if its required.

No guarantees

Firstly, lets just clear up a common misconception. No-one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google or any other search engine! Its simply not possible to make a guarantee of that nature. You should be wary of anyone who is making such claims. Some of these companies use 'black hat' techniques that could result in your site being banned from Google completely!

The way that websites are assessed for ranking in search engines is ever evolving and websites will move up and down the listings on a regular basis. Fortunately there are clear guidelines that help us create websites that are 'search engine friendly' in terms of structure and technical build. The rest is down to the quality of the content of the website and a little bit of pixie dust...!

Solid technical foundations

A poorly constructed web site, where the underlying HTML code isnt written properly and contains errors will not rank as well as a website that is error free. If you've never seen any HTML code before - here's a snippet of the code used to create the top part of this page:

 
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You'll probably never see this code - it's read by your web browsing program (maybe Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or others), interpreted and the interpretation rendered to the screen for you to view.

An organisation called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) produces guidelines that have been adopted globally as the standard for HTML coding.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - the way we control how your website looks on screen, also need to conform to W3C standards. The standards have been developed so that compliant websites should look pretty much identical in all web browsers on all platforms.

There are automated tests that can tell us if the code we produce is error free and conforms to their standards. The two images below show that this page passes both their HTML and CSS tests. You can click these images to run the tests for yourself.

Every web page that we build is built to these standards to ensure that your website will never be penalised by a search engine for containing errors.

A balancing act

Don't forget that your website must do its job at the end of the day - it should attract visitors that convert into sales, members or whatever else you want them to do.

Your content should be written to hook your visitors. Its absolutely pointless having a website that gets loads of traffic through search engines if it doesnt provide relevant and compelling content that your visitors can understand.

Measurement of results

Google Analytics The first thing we'll do when launching a new website or taking over an existing one is ensure that there is a good analytics system in place. In order to increase traffic to a site, we need to know the current levels of traffic.

We use Google Analytics for this. All hail Google! Its the best package around and guess what - its completely free to use.

In a nutshell we're generally interested in the following statistics:

How many visitors does the site get?
Where in the world are they located?
How often do they visit?
How long to they stay on the site?
What are the most popular pages?
Which websites are referring vistors to the site?
What search phrases are visitors using to find the site?

With this information, we can begin to understand how people are using the site and how we can do more to improve its performance.

This just scratches the surface of the information available using Google Analytics but you'll have to see for yourself. Be warned - checking your statistics can be highly addictive!

Find out more about Google Analytics from Google

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To find out more about Search Engine Optimisation and how we might be able to apply our knowledge to improve your site ranking, please get in touch.

01869 255770
info@bicesterwebdesign.co.uk
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Bicester Web Design

Your local source for web site design and development services in Bicester & surrounding areas