Optimising sites for search engines by Retiarius Internet Design

Further to my earlier post on not using frames, a company of my acquaintance had a nicely search engine  optimised site.

It then seems that someone offered to update their site with a new, experimental, ‘jazzy and upbeat’ look. As this was for free they accepted and the new ‘designer’ immediately dumped the existing site and replaced it with their new front-end which basically was a ‘new site coming soon’ and a contact page. They then did not complete the new site but left it unfinished for 4 months.

To compound this mistake the new ‘designer’ used Flash/Shockwave to build the entire new site and provided no words that a search engine could find.

Result, it is now almost impossible to find this company on Google even if you know the company’s name! Total wipe-out!

I don’t know how many times companies are taken in by graphics artists proclaiming to be web designers and the said artist has not a clue as to how the web search engines work.

Established well-known companies can use Flash and Shockwave because they are household names and can afford the best programmers and designers who know how to optimise even a Flash site for SEO. These companies can be found by their trading name, Rolls Royce, Amazon, Ford etc. and not by searching for some product such as ‘luxury car’.

Unfortunately smaller companies need effective search engine optimised sites so they can be found ahead of their competitors for their keywords.

Using Flash and Shockwave for site design provides a desert for search engine bots and I really recommend you do not use them for site design unless you are a household name.

And as  postscript, Apple iPhones and iPads do not support Flash driven sitres – so why alienate a significant section of the  market!

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Recently I was looking for an email address for a company for which I had the full company name. Easy-peasy you say, use Google!

So off I went and Googled their company name ( I won’t say whose, I am not in the habit of ‘outing’ poor web designs by other designers).

The company website was not in the first 1000 hits on Google.co.uk.!

There were plenty of hits to sites such as Applegate which had brief details of the company, but nothing for the company’s own, and probably expensively produced, web site.

And why was this?  Quite simply FRAMES!

The company’s  site, and as I subsequently discovered, all the sites in the group of companies, had been constructed in an identical manner using framesets. There was only the frame wrapper page title and almost non-existent keyword lists for Google to find and index. There wasn’t even a valid site description on the index framepage, no <NO FRAMES> statement, or any attempt to use descriptive title and alt statements on the few navigation elements.

A major problem with using frames is that if the navigation elements are in one frame, and the site content is displayed in another, then the site content, even if it does get indexed by search engines following a page-specific link from another site,  is indexed as a separate page element totally divorced from the site’s navigation elements. This means that the search engine bots cannot crawl the rest of the site.

I don’t know when the sites in question where designed but, as the problem of framed sites and SEO has been known for at least 10 years, there is absolutely no excuse for using frames on business sites which should be fully indexed to capture new clients.

In my opinion any site still using frames for its formatting is one that is not maximising its SEO potential, and for a business site that is throwing good money down the drain and any so-called ‘web site designer’ still advocating frame-driven sites to his/her clients does not deserve the title.

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Capital Aesthetics, a leading London cosmetic treatment clinic have commissioned Retiarius to build their new web site.

The brief was that the site’s owners would like to be able to modify and maintain the site themselves with minimum effort.  This required the use of a form of content management system.

We decided to use the excellent WordPress blogging software as a content management system. There wer several reasons for his:

• The base software is free
• There are many excellent themes for this software that can be adapted to get the look and feel required by the client.
• WordPress can be extended to incorporate powerful SEO plugins that increase the SEO of the site with minimum extra effort.
• The use of an industry  standard software base provides proven upgrade and extension features.
• WordPress is easily read by Google and other search engines
• WordPress can easily incorporate the Google Analytics trafiic measurement system

The client has expressed his satisfaction with the design we have produced which, in his opinion, closely approximates the look and feel of his original site whilst providing the flexibility he needs.

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Retiarius Internet Design have just been commisioned to produce a search engine optimised site for the Rose and Crown public house at Allgreave on the edge of the Peak District.

The original site for the pub had been cleared of content by the previous landlord when he left the business and the original domain name (http://www.theroseandcrown.net) offered for sale at what I believed to be a very reasonable price for such an applicable, and already Google Page 1 ranked domain of several years registration .

On our advice, the new owners were fortunate to, via a third party, quickly purchase this existing domain name from its previous owner and they are now having Retiarius produce a brand new site to take advantage of Google’s preference towards domain names of some age.

As speed was of the essence to prevent Google losing, or reducing, the position for the domain name in its ranks following its closure by the previous owner, a temporary, fully optimised, index page has been put in place on the same day we received the commission.

This page will be  a place holder whilst the final design is discussed, agreed and designed.

It is important in SEO to try and weight the chances of getting good ranking in favour of your client. The purchase of an existing applicable domain name which has a decent ranking can significantly accelerate the SEO process.

Retiarius Internet Design’s experience in such matters can be a valuable resource for its clients.

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Retiarius Internet Design recently were commissioned to upgrade and redesign the site of alternative-vet.co.uk, London’s leading homoeopathic veterinary surgeon Lise Hansen.

A careful redesign, optimising keyword density, meta statements, page titles, page names etc, whilst retaining the look and feel of the original site, has achieved the required page 1 listing in Google.co.uk for the search term “homeopathic vet London” in a remarkably short 14 days!

The page 1 status achieved for this site is a vindication of the methods employed by Andrew Jeffcock of Retiarius Internet Design.  Andrew employs a holistic approach to web design which marries, amongst other things, meta statements, page names, titles, keywords and keyword density to produce a site optimal for search engine spidering.

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WordPress is one the most popular blogging platforms in use today. It has many advantages for site owners wanting a search engine optimised web site.

• It is free, open source and therefore secure. Just download WordPress free from here
• It is easy to use and maintain
• It runs on Apache web servers
• It has many fantastic free themes that can be used and modified to produce a look and feel for your site that suits your business.
• It is almost infinitely customisable by web site designers by using the extensive free plug-ins and widgets to ad functionality and ‘eye-candy’.

This post is about the plug-ins and widgets that I think are the most useful. So here they are in alphabetical order.

1. AddThis Social Bookmark
   Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs. By The AddThis Team.
2. All in One SEO Pack
   This plugin will optimise your WordPress blog so that your posts and pages are indexed more efficiently by the search engines. It is fully featured and lets you single out individual pages for optimisation.
3. Akismet: the best comment spam protection available. It fortunately comes pre-installed, though you’ll still need an API key from WordPress.com. This system will prevent your site being deluged with comment spam. If some should get through it makes it easy to kill the offending comments and also notify the Akismet system so that others are protected, just ast they are protecting you.
4. Events Calendar
   This plugin and wdget makes it easy to embed appointments and events into your blog.  So if you are organising exhibitions, conferences or training days this plugin is for you. It can automatically produce a blog post from the data you input for the event and so save you time when working on your blog.
5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: Steve Smith originally wrote this plugin to make it easy to use Google FeedBurner for syndicating your blog. Google FeedBurner has taken over its maintenance. Very easy to use.
6. Google Analystics for WordPress
   This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics tracking to your WordPress blog. Google Analytics is a very powerful incoming click tracker, allowing to deep  analyse the performance of your site and see where your traffic is coming from.
7. Google XML Sitemaps
   If you don’t know how beneficial Google Sitemaps can be to your blog then read my articles on SEO. Once set up this plugin will inform Google of any changes or additions made to your site automatically. You can download Google XML Sitemaps from here
8. Share This: Alex King creates incredibly useful plugins and this is one of them. If you want to make it easy for your visitors to share your posts on bookmarking or social network sites, this is the one plugin you need.
9. NextGen Image Gallery
   This plugin by Alex Rabe makes the production of in-line image galleries in your blog posts easy and effective. The in-built slideshow widget (helper application) aloows you to embed an auto-rotating  image slideshow into the side panels of your blog.
10. WP-Cumulus
    Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress. A bit of eye-candy which displays a graphical representation of post tags.

So there you have my current top 10 plugins and additions to WordPress.

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Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow" attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect this attribute.

How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”

The effective usage of the rev=”nofollow” tag can improve selected pages Google PageRank by preventing the leakage of ‘Link Juice’ to non-essential (for site PageRank purposes) pages such Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy pages etc. which do not require to be indexed by search engines, but which can, if “nofollow” is not used, dilute the optimim PagerRank for your essential pages such as product descriptions etc.

Learning to implement “nofollow” tags is fairly easy. Learning how to apply them in the proper way does require some skill.

The use of “nofollow” tags can serve many different purposes. They can be used to limit the amount of ‘link juice’ that flows out of a page to external pages of different domains, or they can be used to control where the ‘link juice’ will flow to within a site and its internal pages.

This post is about the use of “nofollow” tags to control the amount of link juice flowing within a site and its internal pages. To better explain this I came up with an illustration that should help the “not so technical” crowd understand this process.

If you would, please visualize your homepage as a bucket, and the subpages as sub-buckets. See the image below:

Your total search engine authority can be represented by what I’m going to call SEO Juice”.

Now, imagine that every link you have, in every page of your site, is a hole in the bucket. Once the different Search Engines pour their “SEO Juice” into your homepage bucket, the juice leaks out to your sub-pages, and external pages, through every link you have.

The problem is that some of your sub-buckets (sub-pages) don’t need that “SEO Juice” as much, while others need a lot of it. A good example is having those “Privacy Policy”, “Shipping Info” types of pages that really don’t need to rank highly in any SERP. So, instead of spreading your “SEO Juice” thin, you’d direct it to where it is most needed. Your site could have an extremely relevant, and high converting sub-page that you want to boost, this would be a good place to start.

The “nofollow” tags help you plug the holes of different buckets and let most of the juice flow where you want more Search Engine authority. See the image below:

Once you’ve drawn the “nofollow” strategy map for your site, and decide on what pages need more search engine authority, the implementation part is quite simple.

Now that you understand what “nofollow” tags can do for your site, make sure you look into taking advantage of this awesome tool, and take control of where your “SEO Juice” is flowing!

Still confused? Let us help you out! Check out our full list of search engine optimization services.

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Elaine Walker of Elanga International Language Services already had a web site for her language translation business but wanted it fully redesigned to be search engine optimised. The new site had to be easily maintained by herself and to use Web2.0 techniques.  Her prime concern was effective search engine optimisation of the new site.

As with Ford & Kidd an optimised front page and blog solution was used as this provided the most cost-effective solution. The front page incorporates PHP code that posts SEO optimised resumés of posts made in the WordPress blog which comprises the majority of the site. The PHP code produces fully W3 complaint XHTML code, the result being a site index page with automatically updated content that cannot be detected as such by search engines as being produced by a script.

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Retiarius Internet Design were approached by  local custom truck body builder Ford & Kidd  to produce their first web site. Ford & Kidd specialise in producing one-off truck body solutions for both new-build and vehicle conversion projects.

Ford & Kidd wanted a web site that they could easily maintain themselves but one that also would be fully search engine optimised.

We decided that the best, and most cost effective, solution was to build a front end to the site which was fully optimised for search engines, incorporating ‘hidden’  PHP code into that page that posted resumés of post made in the WordPress blog which comprises the majority of the site.

The blog software was set up to include effective SEO and also permit the loading of individual photographs and galleries of photographs of vehicles that have been constructed by Ford & Kidd that could be displayed within the posts.

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Blogs Attract More Search Engine Traffic

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

Retiarius Internet Design have been successfully using blogs to generate sustained traffic to clients sites (e.g. for a French villa holiday company ) and by installing a blog on a subdomain of your domain you automatically get some cross-site linking. The effective use of blogs generates ‘link bait’ for other blog owners to want to link to you.

Blog Directories and Site Submission

If you haven’t already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great one-way links. Many of the top directories can be found on Robin Good’s Top 55 list. But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your site get the best keyword placement in the major search engines.

Tip One: Blogs and SEO – Keywords

You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a “lucrative keyword”. Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.

More Web Site Traffic and More Sales? Not Always

You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

Length of Search Query is a Factor

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

Target Your Blog for More Traffic and Sales

It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic – there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales. Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004. As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.

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