SEO- Where to start?

We using SEO as one of the selling points with regards to getting business.

If you design the site with SEO in mind then thats the first step. The two most important areas of the SEO setup are the 'title tags' and the content of the site. All of this must read well and be unique to other pages.

Once this is done its then time to find a niche in the market. If for example you have a training company based in Leeds that train people up in using SAGE then you focus on a local search initially - so 'Joe Blogg - SAGE training company based in Leeds' and then the sub pages should drill down into the content - example - 'Finance Reports - Joe Bloggs Sage training company based in Leeds' and so on.

We have great success in doing this as not only does it get the client traffic, but if you investigate enough then you can really find a niche that no one else is using and thus get you site high up on Google.

An example of this we have done is for our client Ritche Baird.

ritchiebaird.com

They specialise in Insurance and Financial advice. They previously had a website that was almost invisible on google. So we developed a site that honed in ontheir niche market which is high end specialist insurance in Glasgow and Scotland. By doing this they are not only ranking high for 'Insurance brokers Glasgow' which gets 3000 searches per month on Google. They also sit top for 'Specialist Insurance Glasgow' which they have already had some business leads from. This site has been on Google for less than a month.

Simple SEO techniques usually work the best.
 
Hi johnstone

Interesting stuff, I wonder if you've been sandboxed for the term "Specialist Insurance Glasgow" cos' I can't find you with that search, but sure enough "Insurance brokers Glasgow" get's you well up on page 1 big G.

I did the same thing for my site which is marklea.com - pretty much useless in generating traffic - so I chose "Liverpool Photographer" as my keyword. I haven't gone overboard with it (yet) but after one week online it's down the bottom of page 2. Before it was nowhere - this is just standard SEO, writing relevant optimized content with appropriate keyword density etc. I'm gonna leave it alone for a while.

Mark
 
Meta Tags
Click to expand...

But aren't they insignificant in Google now though, aren't they? They just show the description when you are listed in Google, it doesn't actually help your equity...? Maybe I'm wrong... been meaning to ask this q for a while :)
 
You are correct. Google claim they have never indexed META tags (although who really knows what they do with the info behind the scenes). However, there are specific "googlebot" META tags that they will take into account, but are for nothing major that you could not accomplish in "robots.txt";

Meta Tags Google Advice | Meta Tags Google Search

The main search engine ranking factors are;

1. How domain URLs are structured and how content is delivered to the search engines.
2. Page/Site architecture. How the pages are coded and interlinked which includes navigation schemes. Global or otherwise.
3. Content: What textual and multimedia content appear on the site.
4. Links: The number, quality, relevance of inbound links.

Obviously these have huge chapters in themselves and the 4 points above would fill a book. You just have to pick up bits and pieces as you go along.

Such as ... always redirect mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com with a 301 response. Otherwise there is a possibility that you might have two complete sets of links to the same pages and engines dont see this as unique content. Yay for apache mod_rewrite ;)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Click to expand...

or .. always include a sitemap.xml (or if its a big one zipped in gz format) in your domain root (which you can also submit this via the webmaster tools on google) that is in the proper structure. Obviously this is NOT the same as having a human readble sitemap page in HTML with something like a <UL> to reveal the page structure.

look here: http://www.google.co.uk/sitemap.xml

be prepared to wait a little for it to load ;)

you can find the specification here: sitemaps.org - Protocol

But... most importantly. Always be particular with your code to strict standards (XHTML) and include all relevant tags, ie. title, alt etc. This also makes life so much easier, as when you do learn little bits as you go, they are then easy to implement.
 
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