Most of us hope that our commercial or retail web site will find new customers through successful placement in search engine results - alas, all too often, many are disappointed.

Unfortunately, simply having a web site on line is no guarantee that it will bring in new visitors via search engines. No matter how nice a site may look, unless it fulfils some very important conditions it will continue to rank poorly in search result pages, or may not even feature in them at all.

Search engines are the web
It's a fact that for most internet users search engines are the web. Search is the principal method that most people use for finding anything on the web. This is particularly significant within the UK, where research indicates that consumer retail spending on-line is growing at a rate ten times greater than that in the traditional High Street. It's clear that an effective web presence, with a good search ranking profile, has already become a prerequisite for the continuing growth and success of many different types of businesses.

See the two case studies elsewhere on this site for an insight into just how significant this can be for a business.

SEO has become 'business critical'
As a result of this newly emerging on-line market place ‘Search engine optimization’ (SEO) has become quite a buzz term these days, and it’s big business. It also seems to have produced a fair amount of hokum and mystification designed to sell some questionable search engine optimisation 'services'.

You'll probably already have encountered a lot of web design & search marketing agencies offering assurances that they can ‘get you ranked no.1’. In the real world, and in relation to real search terms that are being used by real people, I'd have to argue that that’s an extravagantly bold claim. In fact, I'd say that it's unrealistic for any SEO service provider to promise a high ranking when there are so many variables at play.

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
However, further caution is advisable, because you have to be very careful that any SEO strategy is approached in the right way. There are plenty of unscrupulous and manipulative practices in this field - known as 'Black Hat' methods - and if your domain becomes associated with this kind of unethical SEO practice it can have dire consequences.

To preserve the value and integrity of their search results the developers behind Google and the other search engines regularly take steps to ensure, on an ongoing basis, that their results will not be corrupted by crude or unscrupulous attempts at rank-jumping. There have been some high profile examples of sites that have seen their ranking reset to zero as a penalty for using 'Black Hat' search optimisation techniques.

Strictly White Hat
You can be assured that Western Aspect's web design and SEO services are founded upon following legitimate and strictly 'White Hat' good practice.

The thing about this type of SEO is that (unlike the Black Hat techniques) it requires knowledge, experience, and plain hard work - unfortunately there are no easy fixes that can boost a poor site.

The best path to search engine success begins with the site itself, its underlying structure and, above all, careful market research that, in turn, should inform the development of good quality textual content for the site. This is one of the most frequently underestimated dimensions of a web design project: that creating a successful web site will involve much more than just its visual design. It has to deliver useful, informative content, and developing this can be one of the most demanding and time-consuming elements of the project.  But quality content is what visitors want, and it also plays a critical role in successful search ranking. 

Buying your way to the top
Another common misconception is that gaining position in the search rankings is largely a matter of paying money to the search engine operators. In one sense there's an element of truth in this, but there's an important distinction to be made between 'organic' and 'paid placement' results.

Organic search results
'Organic' search results are the ones that appear in the main body of the search result pages that are returned by search engines such as Google, MSN and others. These organic results are determined solely by the search engine's assessment of the likely relevance of these web sites to the specific search query. It's also worth noting that these results are produced with no human intervention; a search engine is a bit like an algebraic equation - it determines rank based on how it has 'scored' each web site against a number of criteria. Most importantly though is the fact that there is no way to buy any advantage in these listings - your site either scores well, or it doesn't. Good SEO practice is all about ensuring that your site achieves the best possible score, and thus the best possible position in the organic listings.

Paid placement search results
To the right hand side of the search result pages, and sometimes in the top, header area, you will see the 'paid placement' listings - also called 'Pay-per-click'. This is keyword advertising, and it is the means by which search engine companies make their income. With these type of listings you pay a variable fee in order to secure a position on the result page for a particular keyword or search term - although you don't actually pay anything unless and until someone clicks on your link and visits your site (known as click-through). You are effectively bidding in an auction against others for this position, specifying a fixed upper limit that you're prepared to pay for the click-through. For popular, highly-contested, and high value keywords this bidding can be very competitive, and potentially quite costly.

Nevertheless, there's a good case to be made in favour of buying paid listings - few forms of advertising are so specifically targeted at potential customers searching for a particular product or service. And sometimes, in fiercely contested sectors, it may even be the only strategy that will yield short-term successes. This is why we have witnessed the recent massive growth in this kind of advertising - because it works.

However, you still need to ensure that once a visitor has clicked-through to your site that they're going to like what they find, and I would argue that it is still better for a web site to aim, from the outset, for its primary success to be in the organic listings - not least because you won't be paying for the visitor traffic derived from organic listings. 

I can advise upon a search engine marketing strategy that's appropriate to your business and market - one that will certainly give you the best possible chance of achieving successful search ranking.

 

If you'd like to discuss your web design requirements further then please contact me, without obligation, for friendly, informal advice and an estimate.  

Clean, well tagged HTML
While search engines can index ASP pages, PDF files and any number of other things, the fact is that plain old HTML - correctly formatted - remains the easiest thing to digest. Moreover, delivering simple, lightweight, fast-loading, information-rich pages will usually be appreciated a lot more by visitors to your site than sluggish, graphics-laden pages or, worse still, introductory Flash animations that provide no useful benefit whatsoever (‘Skip intro’ indeed!). You can make it easier for a search 'spider' to index the contents of your entire site by creating a site map page, accessible from your home page, containing links to every page in your web site. Additionally, for search success, giving careful consideration to page structure and correct and well-considered use of the essential page title, description, heading and alt tags all make a vital contribution to getting a good ranking. As does…

Considered use of keywords
As well as strategic use of tags, the copy on a site’s pages, and the home page particularly, must be very carefully considered and, ideally, researched. Search success is all about matching people’s enquiries with terms that appear on your pages – to have any hope of being found, it is essential that your pages contain precisely the same terms that people are commonly typing into search engines (and include factors such as alternative spellings; for example, you'll notice this site alternates between the terms 'optimization' and 'optimisation'). A lot of companies trumpeting those ‘we’ll get you ranked no.1’ claims will demonstrate high-ranked results based upon obscure search terms that almost nobody is ever likely to use – but that isn’t really any kind of success at all.

Relevant, quality content
A corollary of the previous point really – after all, that’s what search engines are designed to do: find sites that provide plenty of relevant information to fulfil a searcher’s queries. If your site delivers rich, useful textual content, with the right frequency of relevant keywords, it will rank more favourably. Perhaps even more importantly, the chances are that it will also be more satisfying for your prospective customers when they do find you.

Good, relevant linkage
For good or ill, this is perhaps the most vital element in achieving good search ranking. But alas, unlike the previous points, this one requires some external input and so is the trickiest to control effectively. Being linked is essential, because Google and the other search engines treat every site that has a link to your site as a ‘vote’ for your site; in a sense, it treats inbound links as vouching for the quality of its content. The higher the page rank of a site that links to you, the more value it attributes to your site – rather like a block vote. So, to build your presence in the rankings, you must achieve linkage, ideally from sites that are already highly-ranked – better still if they’re sites from a related field. Without at least some inbound links from other sites on the internet, your web site is unlikely to ever get a meaningful ranking in any search engine results. For you to get anywhere near those hallowed first few pages of Google results, the management of your web site absolutely has to include a link strategy.

Of course, if your web site has useful, interesting or valuable content then picking up linkage needn't be difficult, but it does take some time and application, and sometimes maybe even a little expenditure. Be very wary of those who claim that they’ve got a magic bullet!

And really, in essence, search engine optimization is no more mysterious than that.