go to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" article
Understanding Search Engine
Getting the basics right is not complicated once you have a grasp of how search engines "work".
Here, we explain how to help your website through a better understanding of SEO.
This article concentrates on the much misunderstood use of keywords.
SEO (search engine optimisation)
SEO is the business of getting high page ranking in the search engines.
While a keyword search may produce many pages of results gathered from millions of entries, (to see the exact number of pages searched for your keyword entry in google. Look too the top right of the google results page.
Most sufers rarely look past the first two pages of results.
If you aren’t in the top 3 page results, chances are people will never see your listings and you won’t get much traffic.
Achieving a high page ranking in principal is not a difficult process
How well you perform each step in the process determines how well you will be ranked.
While no two-search engines use the same ranking formula, they all look for the same things.
You just need to know what they are after and give them what they want.
The goal of every search engine is to return highly relevant pages to the keyword that a visitor enters.
Search engines regularly change the way that they arrive at a pages importance, but the one thing that is worth remembering is that all the changes made are to try and improve the delivery of the most relevant web pages to the keywords or phrases used for that particular search.
Search engines now arrive at this base this on a combination of web page popularity (covered in a seperate topic)
Without exception, all the top search engines now put little or no importance on the "keywords" meta tag entry.
A myth that still remains is the belief that search engines read and rank your page on Meta tag information and all you need to do is cram the "keywords meta tag" with all your keywords to get a good results (meta tags are areas of code that are not displayed on the screen, but are read by search engines.)
Nowadays, when we refer to "keywords" or "keyword phrases" we
refer to the specific words that have increased prominence within
specific areas of your actual web page.
This information forms the basis with which, a search engines will start
to determine the importance of the page
in relation to other webpages on the web. Get this area right and you are
already dramatically helping your ranking.
Whilst It is important that your chosen keywords and keyword phrases appear in specific places within your webpage layout to increase their importance, there is no magic formula for how many times the keyword should appear on a page. SEO professionals often discuss ‘keyword density’ or how often the keyword should appear.
A word of warning
Search engines hate cheats and if you are using keywords too often (even innocently) you can actually lower your page rank or get your website banned due to the search engines beleiving you are spamming (cheating) them.
Unfortunately many website developers still do try and cheat the system and whilst this can sometimes be successful in the short term it invariably ends up with a website being removed from the search engine
Spear Solutions Bournemouth provide a complete Search engine optimisation service with a number of Package available to meet specific requirements.
please see our Web Marketing pages for more details.
If you have any individual SEO questions please feel free to contact us
There is no charge for the advice we give and we will try and answer every question asked.
Beauty is not always in the eye
of the beholder.
There is a lot more to a web site than pretty pictures!
Many website companies say they build bespoke websites, and their websites on the face of it look good, but from one quick look at the code you can see the functionality and the way it has been built is so wrong.
Search engine position suffers, speed of the page to display suffers and arguably most important of all the website falls below current web guidelines and accessibility standards.
One big mistake is to confuse how a design looks against the way it is built.
If it is your intention to bypass search engines ( or use pay per click advertising forever!) and have a slow loading website then this won't be of great concern to you ( although you may still be in breach of accessibility legislation concerning websites), but if like most you want your website to work to best effect embracing latest methods then this is area is of paramount importance.
Here is another thing to consider,if you are about to have a new website built, do you want to start off with a website that is already out of date?
Wouldn't it be better to have a website that is future proofed and built to grasp the latest methods for website development?
Over the last year there has been a major change in the way websites are built and this is starting to become very apparent in seperating the website companies I see online.
The importance of seperating content from style cannot be overstated, but it does mean that web design companies need to break with tradition and embrace new development methods. Unfortunately whilst customers are generally at a loss to the workings of a website and the decision of what website to go for is generally decided on it's looks alone, there has not been a rush to update working practices.
Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
Well you can if they need to learn, sooner or later all websites will need to comply with the new methods or they simply won't function correctly. Eventually all web design companies will embrace the new web standards, but there hasn't been a rush to do it so far. Many larger web design companies seem to be the worse at implementing these changes, probably a case of big cogs are harder to turn. At the moment unless you know what to ask, it is still some-what of a lottery what type of website you will end up with;
You run the risk of getting a old website for your new money!
Old or New?
Such things as semantics of the text is vital for search engines and these are lost when you wrap them in font tags, table row and other tags that historically has been the preferred method of coding.
If your websites pages have been made up using tables, then your competitors website will out perform yours in every measureable way (did you know that before Internet Explorer displays a page made of tables, it renders the table first and only displays everything when each table is rendered! compared against a table based page, a page built following using modern methods is lightning fast).
Benefits
Benefits of avoiding the old methods means: clarity in code, browser and other web-enabled devices compatibility, seperation of content and presentation allowing semantic text, smaller burden on bandwith, and better visibility to search engines.
As a customer you do not need to aquire any great understanding of how websites work or are developed.
Just remember to keep an eye out for bespoke solutions that are at least XHTML compliant.
This is a benchmark standard that makes it a lot easier for your website to be developed further and will future proof you against dated coding methods that are soon due to be deprecated ( discontinued, causing possible malfunctions ) from the web.
Based on an article by Neil Macleod, Spear Solutions consultant
Neil Macloed is an authoratitive voice on website development and has contributed
regularly to many web development forums.
Spear Solutions Bournemouth offer free Impartial advice on all aspects of the Internet.
We are able to offer a free on-site consultancy service to businesses in
the Bournemouth and Poole area of Dorset.
To arrange an appointment contact us now by email or
phone Bournemouth 01202 258371
