WM Web Design of Solihull specialists in the design and optimisation of high quality websites for businesses, clubs, societies or charities and personal websites for individuals.

Search Engine Optimisation(SEO)

Most people understand something about the process of Website Design but few outside of the industry understand the art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In fact most people assume that once their website is on the web... all they have to do is sit back and wait for the enquiries to start flooding in.
If only life were that simple!
At WM Web Design of Solihull we know how confusing it can all be, but we will try to explain the basics to you in a no nonsense way..... hope it helps!

 

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is a vital part of the web design sevice. It is a process which helps Google, and the other search engines, to find your website when someone types a relevant search query into their browser.

What that means for you is that your website will be found from web searches and if your website has been designed with customer appeal in mind i.e. looks good, is functional and has the right content... those enquiries will start coming in.

If you want a more in depth definition, take a look at the definition of SEO provided by Wikipedia.

 

Who needs Search Engine Optimisation?

• A business which is in competition with other businesses (and which business isn't?) and wants to be found ahead of their rivals.
• A club or society which wants to be found in order to attract new members.
• Anyone who wants their website to be found from a search query and would rather be on the first page of the "Search Engine Result Pages" (SERPS) than the 50th page or even the second page.
• Anyone who wants to increase the traffic to their website.

The process of Search Engine Optimisation...

The process of SEO is ongoing, so in that respect the process is never complete.
WM Web Design get your Search Engine Optimisation campaign off to a great start by giving you a website design consisting of fully compliant xhtml and CSS, which makes your site easy for the search engines to read and index. We also verify your website with Google. But there is so much more you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

Various elements of the Optimisation process are explained in more detail in the next column, but a summary of the process is:

• Decide that your site needs to be optimised.
• Produce a "search engine friendly" website design or modify existing design.
• Decide the key words / target words that visitors will type into the search engines for your goods or services e.g. if people are looking for sports cars in Solihull, they will probably type in "sports cars Solihull".
• Optimise text and html tags... domain name, on-page text, title tags, meta tags, heading tags, bold tags, alt tags for images, html file names (ongoing).
• Upload site and register / verify / add site map with major search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN.
• Register with Google Maps and other local listings and business directories.
• Initiate link building campaign (ongoing).
• Resolve any canonical issues / missing pages with a 301 redirect using .htaccess file.
• Monitor results and if required, plan next stage of search engine optimisation.

It's not enough to have a website, if people can't find you from their search terms or you are so low down in the search results that people don't find you... why have you got a website?
Don't forget, WWW stands for World Wide Web so there's a lot of competition out there and most of them are using SEO.

 

What can Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) do for your website?

There are no guarantees in SEO, and anyone who tells you that they can get you to #1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN, may be exaggerating a little.
It would be true to say however, that all things being equal, a well optimised website will always rank higher than one that isn't.

Higher rankings mean... that you will increase the number of visitors to your site, which will increase your sales, increase the number of people who join your club or whatever it is your site is trying to achieve.

The search engine spiders, that trawl the net, never sleep. They are constantly looking for information on the millions of websites out there in order to update the vast databases of Google, Yahoo and MSN. We see the results of the spider's trawling every time we type in a search query... help the spiders and help your website with efficient high quality Search Engine Optimisation.

Costs for Search Engine Optimisation:

When it comes to SEO, you can spend as much or as little as you like.
At one end of the spectrum, if your site is performing to your satisfaction... you don't have to spend a penny.
If your site is not doing well in the search engine rankings and you are not attracting the traffic you were expecting... we need to do a little Search Engine Optimisation.

If you are looking to improve the performance of your website, our advice is... allow us to carry out your SEO in discrete packages.
At each stage we can decide what improvements to make, upload your site complete with optimisation and monitor your rankings.
We can repeat the process as many or as few times as you like with spending limits agreed at each stage.

Still to come....

We are about to add a few pages to our website to help you make choices about your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.
Topics will include...

• Search engines... who are the big three players and how do you register with them.
• Keywords... how do you decide on the keywords for your site and what do you do with them.
• Organic ranking factors ... which are the most important organic search engine ranking factors.

A few details of the Search Engine Optimisation process...

The process starts by asking yourself what words or phrases would potential clients type into the search engine if they were looking for your goods or services.
Once we decide on these keywords or target words, we can make a start...

 

Copy is king

Search engines discover and catalogue websites using search engine spiders or bots.
The bots can only do one thing... read text. That means that you have to provide lots of text and the text has to be relevant to search criteria.
However... not all text is equal. Take a look at Search Engine Ranking Factors, a free guide provided by SEOmoz, to find out which items are the most important.

 

Links, links, links... did I mention links?

The web is in a constant battle with... spammers. That's why search engines like trusted sites. A measure of how much your site is trusted (and its popularity) is directly related to the number of other sites that link to your site and the importance of those linking sites.
So, once your site is active, we need to build up the external links and make sure that they are quality links.
For most websites, link building is an ongoing process.

 

SEO for your website

We hope that we have explained clearly what is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), how it may be implemented and how it can benefit your website. If you are looking for a new website design or would like us to apply SEO to your existing site, please feel free to contact us.

 

Website Design Special offers

We understand the power of having your own website, but we also understand that funds are sometimes limited.
We hope that our special offers will help.

We are involved with the ASC - Association of Speakers Clubs - and are happy to announce a special offer for ASC Club Websites (see the Sans Souci Speakers Club website for an example of our work).
Your website should look as professional as the people you are hoping to attract.
Contact us for details.

We are always glad to help with community projects and local charities, low budget shouldn't mean low quality... see special offer below.

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