Search Engine Optimisation:
A black art or a piece of cake?

If you have a website (or need one built) then it's a natural for you to want to know how to get people to visit it. The best looking website without traffic is no more useful than a printed brochure that's never sent to anyone.

It's very rare that I have a conversation with a new or existing client without spending quite some time discussing what can be done do to increase traffic to their website. In many ways it's the most important topic to cover - and the hardest to nail down. Although it's possible to get good, valid results by using common sense (and not attempting to trick the search engines), it's a combination of activities that need to be carried out in order to achieve this. There is no single big green 'put my website at the top of the list' button that can be pressed - unless you're willing to pay for the privilege.

If you register, build and upload a website, it doesn't automatically follow that Google will add it to its list of searchable websites, and that when someone types in the perfect phrase, your site will appear at the top of the list of results. It's easy enough to add a URL to Google - the problem is that millions of other people are doing the same thing every day. And lots of them are going to be in competition with your site to get to the first results page.

So what are the Seo options?

SEO Best Practice - what can be done to make search engines happy?

Include useful, worthwhile content

Search engines like Google are essentially trying to make the Internet a worthwhile, useful resource. How many times have you searched for a piece of information, only to be presented with a website full of links to other vaguely related sites? I find this to be worse than useless and very annoying. Google doesn't want this though - it wants to be able to return the results you actually want - because the more relevant its results, the more people will use Google. That's why Google is always striving to adapt its algorithms to ignore the rubbish and include the useful.

So it follows that if your site contains useful information (not just a 'here's my product, please buy it message') it has a better chance of doing well in the search engines. The Internet was, after all, invented primarily as a means of sharing information; not as a new way to sell merchandise. This is still the primary function of the Internet as far as the search engines are concerned.

Standard procedure - META tags

As a matter of course, when we design and construct a new website, we includes appropriate META tags in the page header, including keywords and a description. This is hidden information which helps the search engines to identify what the page is about, and what to display in the listings summary.

META tags are not the only thing the search engines look at when assessing a page's relevance to a search query. They also (to varying degrees, depending on which search engine is being used) look at the header, title and body text to get a more rounded picture of the content. So the text on a page must relate to the keywords and description.

Keyword research

It's a very good idea to do as much keyword research as possible for every page on your site - rather than dumping in a load of keywords (the same on every page) which are generally relevant to the site, and specifically relevant to none of the pages individually. Niche is better than broad. The more 'niche' a page's content, the better the chance it will be found.

Keywords or key phrases can be researched in numerous ways, but a great (and free) starting point is Google's Keyword Tool. By typing in a key word or phrase, the tool will return a list of similar phrases based on the previous month's actual searches. It'll show roughly how many people searched for it (demand) and how much competition there was for that word or phrase based on Google pay-per-click advertisers (supply). The trick is to write a page which is high in demand but low in supply. It's a time-consuming but useful exercise. It'll help you come up with ideas for pages which will be informative and will therefore draw in relevant visitors from the search engines.

Take an active interest in your content

If you spend time considering what text to include in your website, and then take an ongoing interest in adding to it and updating it, you'll be streets ahead of your competition. Sites that tend to do better online are the ones regularly updated with useful and contributory content. This could be news about your company, industry news or useful articles or tutorials.

A graphic design website, for example, should not only contain graphics from a portfolio (vital as they are), but also information about, say, how to improve rankings in search engines...

A very popular, effective way of updating content is with a blog (web log). This can be a single page of regularly updated company news, forthcoming events or general industry information.

Other (free) ways to build qualified traffic

There's no denying that (relevant) link exchanging is a good thing as far as Google is concerned. This means that you have to persuade owners of websites relevant (but not in competition with) yours add a link from their site to yours. This doesn't mean you should have a big links page with hundreds of links out of your site - it means that you should offer a useful, contextual link from a page on your site and ask for the same in return. The more relevant sites that Google sees your site linked from, the better.

With the above in mind, it's a good idea to submit your website to relevant free directories such as the Open Directory Project. This is a human-edited directory, and is useful because some major search engines spider it for results. The theory is that because it's human-edited it will probably contain more useful, vetted websites than directories which use computers to add sites rather than people.

You know your business better than anyone

Tinstar Design always encourages its clients to undertake as much keyword research and content updating as possible themselves for two reasons. The first is that they know best the ins and outs of their company and are therefore better placed to write the right kind of content for their visitors. Second, it's a time-consuming process, and time costs money - so the more they do themselves, the less they'll pay others to do it for them.

We understand, however, how few hours there are in the working day, and often the company website's content (and marketing in general) is the first to suffer as a result. This is why, if you need us, Tinstar Design will gladly undertake keyword research and copy writing on your behalf, drawing on our experience to promote your site and improve its rankings to the best of our ability.

If you'd like to talk about your requirements, find out more, or would like an estimate of cost, please complete the simple form opposite and we'll get back to you as quickly as possible. Alternatively, pleased don't hesitate to call us on 01590 679490.

OK - But What about...

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Paying for results - what tried and tested methods can we recommend?

Don't wait for high quality, organic results

You may have heard of 'organic' search engine optimisation. This means that your site has been designed and written with best practices in mind, and it is starting to do well in the search engines without any money being spent on online marketing or pay-per-click campaigns. However, you could be waiting for months, perhaps even years before your site starts to improve its organic position, depending on how much time you've spent on your site's content and online presence.

Good, instant results come at a price, and there are some very good options available for the website owner who wants to get things moving much faster.

There are a multitude of ways to get your website noticed, many of which you'll need to spend time surfing to find - but here are a handful of the most popular and successful (and cost-effective) options you should take advantage of.

Pay-per-click campaigns

For many business owners, the thought of paying for every single click that Internet users make on their advert puts them off even trying a pay-per-click marketing campaign.

In fact, a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is easy to control, incredibly focused, cost-effective, affordable and (dare I say it?) even fun to do! There are a number of options out there, but the two big boys are the Yahoo! Sponsored Search and Google Adwords.

Both of these look and behave in much the same way. Basically, you set up an account and decide what key phrases (or keywords if they are niche enough) you want people to find your advert with. You then decide on a daily, weekly or monthly budget. Your ads will only appear until the budget is reached so your spending doesn't spiral out of control. You then decide on a catchment area - the whole world or just Hampshire - it's up to you. And you can decide only to show you ads at lunchtime on a Wednesday if you like!

The ads will only appear when someone types in a key phrase you have specified and they actually click on your advert. Already you have attracted a potential customer to your website who is interested in your product or service (assuming you have worded your advert appropriately). The amount you pay for the click depends on how much you 'bid' for it. The more you bid for a click (depending on the amount of competition you face) will determine how far up the Google or Yahoo listings your advert appears.

Tinstar can manage your PPC Campaign

If you feel that you won't have time to manage an online campaign, We'll be happy to help you out. Tinstar Design will take care of your keyword research, advert copy writing and campaign management for you - please give Nick Beresford-Davies a call on 01590 679490 to discuss how.

Relevant directory listings

Earlier I mentioned the (free) Open Directory Project directory as a good place to get your site into. A faster listing with the Yahoo Directory can be obtained at a price. This directory can be a very useful one to get your site listed with, and should help you get added to various search engines faster than normal. This is because most of today's search engines 'spider' their results from one of just a handful of sources. For example, if you're in Google, you can be sure that you'll also appear in hundreds of secondary search engines as a result - because they get their results direct from Google.

Find as many directories which are directly relevant to your website as possible, and get listed with them. If they charge for a listing, check them out thoroughly before committing.

SBI (Site Build It)

A few years ago Tinstar embarked on various SEO experiments in an attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of good and bad advice. The inescapable conclusion we reached was that there existed no 'quick fix'; the only way to get qualified, sustained, plentiful organic traffic from the Internet was to put time and effort into it.

This on its own is not enough, however. The pages also need to be assembled correctly and submitted to the right places at the right intervals. There's so much to consider that a tool is required in order to assist the process. The tool I found was called SBI (Site Build It).

SBI is an excellent website tool designed specifically to create a high quality, content rich, search engine friendly website. The resulting site can be used either as a gateway to your company site, or as a information portal in its own right.

Graphic Design Employment.com

In order to explain the value of this system better, I will use our training website www.graphic-design-employment.com, as an example. This site was created initially to train our in-house designers, but so much work went into it that we felt it would be worthwhile to publish it online for two reasons - in order to be of use to young designers, and to promote Tinstar Design as a competent, experienced and knowledgeable studio. We have not been disappointed with the results.

Use Alexa to find your website rank

Without going into tremendous detail about the work involved in developing such a website (which uses technology within even an Internet novice's capabilities), I'll simply point you to Alexa.com to show how well the site has done. Alexa is a self-styled monitor of global website rankings, and is another useful tool in a large SEO marketing arsenal.

At the time of writing, a new unlisted website might be ranked at around 24,000,000 worldwide. The graphic-design-employment.com website at one year old was ranked 520,000 worldwide with an average 800 visitors per day and rising. It has proved to be the most successful SEO tool we have ever used for both information dissemination and website promotion. To see how well it's doing today, try a search for "graphic design employment" in Google, Ask, Live and Yahoo (the big four) to see how well positioned the website is.

To discuss how a site created with SBI can benefit your business please don't hesitate to call us on 01590 679490 and ask for Nick Beresford-Davies, Creative Director.

Tinstar Design Limited, Londesborough House, 34-35 High Street, Lymington, Hampshire, SO41 9AF
Tel 01590 679490, Fax 01590 688955 :: www.tinstar.co.uk :: design@tinstar.co.uk
Registered in England Wales Number 04464814 :: VAT Registration: 704 2706 64
Tinstar Design is a Hampshire based graphic design company situated in Lymington,
between Southampton and Bournemouth on the southern edge of the New Forest National Park.
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Search Engine Optimisation: A black art or a piece of cake?