Making a Website Search Engine Friendly

Most companies have embraced the technology of the internet are have a website detailing all their products and services. Having worked for a domain company for a number of years which also offer web design it never ceases to amaze me how many people phone us up complaining that their website is not coming up in the search engines. We offer web design at an affordable price and each site is built using the clients’ specification not with search engines in mind.

Most web design companies are the same; they build a site with your specification and text. If you want a site that is search engine friendly this needs to be stated at the start, although the price will go up considerably. Also you can’t say you want this and that and also be search engine friendly. Generally what our web design customers want are not the same as what search engines want.

Search engines want text rich site with a simple clear navigation. A website built entirely in flash may look pretty impressive but it will not function at all in the search engines. Search engines are text analysis systems which can only read text. Unless your web pages have plenty of text the search engines will not think your site is relevant to list it high in their search engine result pages (SERP’s). If you have a page with say 50 words but another site of the same subject has over 200 words, Google will rank the latter much higher up because it believes it is more relevant than the page of just 50 words. As well as rich text you also need links from other sites linking to your site.

This is giving you a vote and the more votes you have from relevant websites the higher you will get ranked. Sometimes pages that are number 1 have very little text but have a huge amount of link popularity hence why Google places them at the top position. Unless your site has lots of sites linking to your site, you will need good copy on your page. The text on your page needs to have the keywords you are targeting. There is no point having a page about ‘dog food’ without the words ‘dog food’ written a few times. Search engines do not know that Pedigree Chum or Iams are different types of dog food. They match the keywords’ you put into the search engine with relevant pages which contain those specific words.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising a website for the search engines. This could include re-writing the text on each page as well as creating a better navigation that the search engine spiders can navigate well to find all the pages on your site. There is not one SEO Company that can guarantee high search engine placements as know one knows what tomorrow will bring. The same can be said of stock brokers as they cannot guarantee that a stock will rise. Or you could liken the process to a football game; you cannot guarantee who will win. If you are guaranteed a top placement by your SEO specialist, the guarantee is false and you should stay well away. No search engine optimisation company can guarantee results the search engine algorithms can change unexpectedly. A professional SEO specialist will be able to give you a rough idea but no guarantees’. For example, I could do a bit of research for a client who wants to be found under the search phrase ‘vehicle leasing’. When you do a search for those terms there are only just over 750,000 results which could appear to not be that competitive. I have got pages on the front page with over 20 million results in a matter of a couple of months. What this could mean is that the 20 million results were websites that were not that well optimised and with my skills getting on the front page is easy. However with ‘vehicle leasing’ the 750, 000 pages that already exist could have had years of optimisation work done on them with years of link building to build up the trust in their site which means no site has got a chance. Also you don’t know what other companies are planning. Maybe a new Vehicle leasing company with a huge marketing budget of 20 thousand a year might be working on their site. If I am only working on your site for one day a week I will not be able to compete with the companies with a huge budget, and 40 hours of SEO work.