The importance of SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is now one of the most important aspects of web design. The millions of web sites out there, many of them competing with you for business, make expanding your business more difficult.
The almost exponential expansion use of search engines to find goods and services carries on apace and if your site is not seen it can be virtually worthless to you.
We no longer say we ‘searched’ for an item, we now tend to say we ‘Googled’ for it – such is the almost overwhelming power of that one search engine.
Google now accounts for over 80% of all searches on the web!
To get your site near the top of Google you need to optimise your site’s design to be compatible with Google’s search algorithms.
This is no longer a task that can be ‘bolted’ on after the site has been designed. Google’s search system now expects high standards of HTML code programming, optimal search and keyword densities and looks at the total text on the page, both visible and in the ‘hidden’ meta tag statements for context.
To achieve this you need to take a ‘holistic’ approach to the page design.
You must:
- include the relevant keywords in the headers and on the page
- use correctly the various levels of <h> statement to give the search engine’s semantic checking algorithms guidance as to the relative importance, and connectivity, of the phrases on the page.
- Spell all words correctly!
- have your page code fully World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant.
- check out your rivals sites using the W3C HTML validator and semantic checkers and see where they got it wrong!
You must not
- use Flash or Shockwave to design your site. Both these technologies are completely incompatible for search engine ‘spidering’
- use hidden text (text same colour of background), keyword spamming, large list of keywords on the page etc. These are the favourite tricks used in the past by so-called SEO experts. They are the death of a site as far as Google are concerned. They know these tricks an actively penalise sites that employ them.
- set up banner or link ‘farms’ with hundreds of links to your clients sites …. yet again a no-no for Google.
Retiarius Internet Design are specialists in designing SEO friendly web sites. We always produce W3C compliant code and advise you at the design stage how best to achieve the search engine placement you are aiming for.
Please note that we will never (unlike many SEO companies) ‘guarantee’ a search engine position. What we do say is that we have many satisfied clients who have seen their site move substantially upwards in their search engine placement with corresponding increases in new business.
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