Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

In providing an SEO service, we often find ourselves dealing with different situations from site to site. Some clients who approach us to improve their position in Google searches are doing so because their existing sites are set up in a non-SEO-friendly way; others may be set up correctly but missing optimised content. Or, in an ideal situation, we will have coded the site ourselves with the intention of integrating effective SEO from the outset.

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This site was coded by Semlyen IT, and the SEO – both onsite and offsite – was provided as part of the original site development. The site, which sells craft kits for children, has done well for various search phrases. As a follow up, the site’s owners have commissioned an SEO boost in the form of some additional work for those phrases which are lagging behind. We keep track of how well each phrase is doing by logging the position of each in Google results every few weeks.
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Lodge Environmental Solutions have been a client of ours for some time. In the past the company has worked mainly in contract and industrial cleaning in the local area, but have now decided to focus on some other more specialised cleaning services, and to offer these services nationally.

The site was redesigned, and the structure was built around some predetermined search engine optimised phrases for the new services. Building a site around the SEO structure – rather than trying to fit a potentially large number of phrases into an existing site that was not necessarily built with SEO in mind – means that it is possible for every page on the site to be clearly focused on one topic.

In the case of this site, which offers a broad range of cleaning services, some nationally and some in specific localities, it gives the site much more scope for appearing at a good position in Google for each individual service.

For example, the company offers a broadly defined ‘extreme cleaning‘ service – covering a variety of heavy-duty cleaning jobs such as gross filth clean-up, drug paraphernalia removal, crime and trauma scene clean-up, chemical and sewage spill cleaning and graffiti removal. Each of these is briefly covered on the main extreme cleaning page, and then in more detail on a page of its own. This not only maximises the opportunities for focused SEO on each page, but also provides a user-friendly interface as site visitors navigate through overviews to specific services – so it’s human-friendly as well as search engine-friendly.

Another service that Lodge specialise in is pure water cleaning, which is a window cleaning technique suitable for cleaning both exterior and interior windows. To give the greatest potential for SEO of both ‘interior pure water window cleaning‘ and ‘exterior pure water window cleaning‘ we made two pages for the site – one with the SEO focused on ‘interior’, and one on ‘exterior’.

As the cleaning techniques for both are exactly the same, it would have been possible to just duplicate one page and replace ‘interior’ with ‘exterior’ throughout. However, Google does not regard sites with duplicate content favourably. Instead, we focused the main page about the pure water cleaning service on the ‘exterior’ phrase, and optimised another page, which explains how the technique works, on the ‘interior’ phrase. This way there is not only no duplicate content, but also some additional, useful information.

When building a site that is designed to be read most effectively by search engines, it’s important to keep in mind that it has to be user-friendly for humans as well. Just as there’s little point to a user-friendly, well-designed website with no SEO – resulting in nobody ever seeing it – a site with great SEO but no real useful content is not likely to promote business either. Fortunately, good SEO and useful content are not separate issues – the sites most favoured by Google are usually those that are not only well optimised for search, but also contain genuine content.

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Recently we’ve had quite a surge in the number of clients who have come to us for SEO services.  One of the sites that underwent some SEO treatment in October was that belonging to Cloudfree IT, who are a team of IT consultants in Keighley, Shipley and Bingley in West Yorkshire.

This site was an interesting one to work on, as much of its existing navigation relies on Javascript. If a page is only linked to the rest of the site via a Javascript link, Google is unable to find it, and the page is not indexed. This meant that there were quite a few pages on the site which, even if they received heavy onsite SEO, would never appear in any Google search because Google simply couldn’t see them. Ideally we would recode the site, which is still a possibility for the future but since the budget to do this was not immediately available and SEO was seen as more of a priority, we needed a work-around.

Our solution was simple: we created a site map, and made sure that every page was linked from that via a static text link. Within a few weeks Google had not only indexed the pages for the first time, but they were also beginning to climb to higher positions for various searches such as ‘IT support in Shipley‘, ‘computer repairs in Bingley‘ and ‘Keighley computer services‘.

Another interesting point that arose when optimising this site was the fact that when a Google search is performed which contains ‘IT’, Google will often ignore this, as it sees it as the word ‘it’ which is disregarded by the search engine due to being a very commonly used word. Google does have an option at the bottom of pages of such results inviting the user to view results which do contain the word ‘it’, but this is hard to spot, especially when quickly flicking through different sites, and I imagine many users will miss it.

This means that it takes considerably more effort to obtain a high position for searches containing ‘IT’. When optimising a site for ‘Keighley IT consultants‘, if Google is only paying attention to the words ‘Keighley’ and ‘consultants’, many other consultants within various other professions in Keighley are unwittingly competitors for the Google top position. Despite this, after our SEO treatment Cloudfree IT has gained a number 1 position in Google for ‘IT consultants in Keighley‘ without having to click the ‘display results that contain the word “it”‘ button. It’s interesting to note, however, that position number 2 is currently occupied by a firm of recruitment consultants, position 3 by business consultants, and 4 by transport consultants – none of whom offer any IT services at all!

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York letting agents City Lets, one of our growing number of property clients, are now enjoying a feature on their website that allows their properties to be featured on a range of other websites in addition to on their own.

National property portals such as Rightmove, PropertyLive and Fish4 are well advertised and receive a huge amount of web traffic. City Lets had been advertising their catalogue on some of these portals by manually maintaining the details of each property. A time-consuming task, given that the data essentially replicates the content of their website.

So the solution is obvious: have our website database automatically keep the national property portals up-to-date on the latest changes.

Setting up the feeds wasn’t as straightforward as you might hope: of course, the various portals have a range of wonderfully incompatible specifications for data transfer, but that’s the kind of problems we get paid to sort out.

So, our brand spanking new server (which Andy will be telling you all about soon enough) gathers all the data together every night and uploads it all to Rightmove, PropertyLive, Zoopla! and (coming soon:) Fish4.

This means much broader publicity for all City Lets properties, and City Lets save a heck of a lot of time by not having to maintain their catalogue manually.

In other City Lets news, they are also currently promoting their York serviced apartments service, so this has meant some new SEO adjustments to give the relevant pages on the site a boost for search phrases related to this.

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We’ve had several new SEO clients recently – the latest SEO project to be completed was some off-site optimisation for online estate agents Upping Sticks.

Although we have a growing number of estate and letting agents’ websites in our portfolio, this is the first company we’ve worked for that operates entirely as an online estate agent rather than having physical premises. Their decreased overheads mean that they will charge a low cost fixed fee to sell your home online, and rather than operating over a localised geographical area, they cover the whole of the UK.

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