SEO | Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

When a website already has a #1 position for some searches, particularly those using location-specific terms, it may be time to think about building on this with new SEO campaigns. Scoot Cycling Holidays, who recently commissioned some SEO work, were already sitting at the top of Google for “cycling holidays in Yorkshire” and related searches, but found that being in this position was not bringing them as much web traffic, and thus as much business, as they wanted.

Their target market is visitors from abroad, primarily those visiting Britain from the USA and Australia, who might want to take a short countryside break in the middle of a tour of major cities. As such people may not have a specific county in mind prior to their visit, they may be unlikely to type “Yorkshire cycling holidays” into Google. Furthermore, when I did some search popularity research with the location set to the US, I found that the monthly searches that include “cycling holiday” are fairly low. Thinking this was simply a case of the UK’s “holiday” being equivalent to the USA’s “vacation” I tried “cycling vacations”. Surprisingly, this was even less popular, according to Google’s Keyword Tool. After a bit more research, I found that the more commonly used term is “cycling tour”, and similar variables.

Choosing exactly which phrases to optimise the home page for was tricky for this site – they wanted to keep their position at the top for “Yorkshire cycling holidays”, and were already on page 2 for “UK cycling holidays”, which, although less popular, still brought them some traffic. “England bike tours” was the primary phrase I chose, while keeping the Yorkshire and UK cycling holidays content included so that they would maintain their positions. As the site had previously had very dilute and unfocused SEO content, the SEO for the “cycling holidays” phrases was improved by the treatment, even though they were only secondary terms. The site has since risen several places for “UK cycling holidays” and remains at position 1 for “Yorkshire cycling holidays”. It has made an entry a little further down Google’s search results for “England bike tours”, in which it could not be found anywhere prior to any treatment. As the SEO work is not yet complete, this is a promising start.

The meta keywords before the SEO treatment: the existing content was dilute and unfocused – more than half of the keywords had little relevance to the content of the page, or the SEO target. Google pays little attention to these anyway, so they were of little use, and getting in the way of the real content.

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As the importance of SEO becomes more well-known, we’re taking on an increasing number of projects for small businesses who have existing websites and limited budgets. The websites that they originally set up may not have been built with SEO in mind, or even to best practice regarding the coding standards we would normally apply when building a new site. However, even with a small budget and half a day’s work, it can be possible to take a site that cannot be found anywhere in Google and give it a significant boost. This usually does not involve much recoding, and seldom changing the site’s appearance – it’s more a case of ensuring the right tags (for example, the title and meta tags) are in the right place and say the right things, and adjusting the written content to make sure it reflects what the site is about.

This may sound like common sense, but it’s quite easy to accidentally write a site’s content in a way that means it could be ignored by Google for what it supposed to be its target key phrase. A common mistake is making the title tag of the homepage just say “Home”. Another related problem is starting the website with a generic heading such as “Welcome to my Website”. These are the first things that Google will read when it encounters a site, so, if you are a York builder, as one of our recent clients is, these two important places ought to include phrases such as “builder in York“. If you have graphics and headers already proclaiming that this is what you do, it’s sometimes easy to forget that although the human eye sees these as prominent, search engines may not. Even if there is relevant alt text behind the image, Google wants to know that you’re so certain of your identity as a York builder that you’ve made it your website’s main heading. Preferably twice, in the title bar and as the H1 heading.

However, search engines, although not yet sentient (we hope) have evolved a bit of cynicism. If, for example, a webpage has headings declaring that the site belongs to a York architect, but the body text does not contain phrases such as “architect in York” or even mention the words “York” or “architecture” very much at all, Google may look at it, get a bit hopeful at the beginning about its relevance to architecture, but then be disappointed when the rest of the site’s content doesn’t follow through. It needs to be reassured that the title isn’t just a red herring. Fortunately, it’s quite an easy adjustment to make. If someone genuinely is a York-based architect, it’s a sensible thing for them to state on their website, if they haven’t already.

This is another illustration of how writing content for search engines should not be regarded as a separate art from writing for human readers. The fine-tuning of the details is what makes the difference.

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Curtains 2 U is the online trading portal of Boston Spa’s branch of the Curtain Exchange franchise. As a curtain shop near Wetherby and Tadcaster, their geographical competition for search engine results is not high, as small towns would not ordinarily sustain more than one or two curtain makers. Their page on the franchise’s own website already tops Google’s results for “curtain shop in Boston Spa”, so there is no need for us to do any further work there.

We are currently testing the water regarding SEO for the much more competitive phrases “online curtain shop” and “buy curtains online“. Originally we built the site as a low-cost e-commerce solution. It features a budget bespoke catalogue management system, integrated with Mal’s Cart. As the site was coded by us, it was built to our usual coding standards which allow for maximum SEO treatment if required. The client did not ask for SEO in the original quote, but they have since approached us to add some optimisation, both for the main “online curtain shop” phrases, and also some secondary geographical optimisation to target nearby Wetherby and Tadcaster.

The site received a rigorous, in-depth SEO treatment, and also has a few backlinks from our other clients’ links directories (although the effectiveness of these is now uncertain…). It will be interesting to see how much improvement this treatment produces in what appears to be a very competitive area – can this site compete with the established sites? They may be older and larger, but may not necessarily be as concisely coded.

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Some SEO jobs can be more challenging than others. While many of our SEO projects are for straightforward phrases such “York estate agents”, there are some for which the target phrases are not so obvious to someone who works outside the client’s professional field.

One such project that we have taken on was for Pharmaceutical Market Access specialists Roboleo. Since we did not know much about this area, this project involved extensive discussion with the clients, to determine which phrases best described their site. The second phase of this preliminary work was working out which variations of these phrases were actually searched for, through the use of Google’s Keyword Tool and previous web statistics on the client’s existing website – after all, being top of the Google results for a phrase which nobody ever types into Google’s search box isn’t much better than having no SEO at all.

Another project we’ve just taken on is for driving instructor Andrew Taylor or AAA Instructor Training – but again, his field is specialised. Andrew does give regular driving lessons in Wakefield to learner drivers, but his main area of expertise is training others to become driving instructors themselves. As with any profession, there are acronyms and technical language which can be hard to contextualise just by looking at the site as an outsider to the area. It may have been relatively straightforward to decide on the phrase “driving instructor training courses in Wakefield“, but “fleet ADI training courses” was a little more elusive. I’m guessing only a driving instructor trainer – or someone who wanted to become one – could tell me that was a sensible phrase for which to optimise the site.

While the Roboleo site was designed and coded in house at Semlyen IT, the AAA Instructor Training site is a classic example of a website created using a third party content management system which was not very search engine friendly. In this case we have taken on the site ourselves and stripped out the CMS, which means that we will now have full control over adding the SEO content.

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Much of our work is in the development of multiple-paged, often complex, dynamic websites, but there are occasions when this kind of site isn’t needed. Some small businesses, such as an aerial installer in York whose site we made recently, simply require an online presence so that their customers can find them on the web. If your business doesn’t need to sell products online, take online bookings or offer a range of different services, your website can be a simple, one-page static site and still be an effective tool in attracting new customers.

In building websites which are, in effect, an online business card or flyer, we can apply some of the same design criteria as we would to an equivalent paper document – prominent contact details and a brief description of what’s on offer so that site visitors get an instant overview.

But simply making an online flyer isn’t the end of it – there are other considerations when marketing on the web, and probably the most important is SEO. If a website isn’t properly optimised for search engine visibility, it almost certainly won’t be bringing in many new customers – and in some cases, may as well not exist at all.

Fortunately, optimising a website for search engines has many parallels with providing information to site visitors. As well as contact details and a quick overview, providing a more detailed description of the services a business offers is beneficial to both human readers and search engines. The more the readers know about what a business does and how it operates, the more likely they are to pick up the phone and get in touch. The more written content on a website, particularly with relevant key phrases, the more valuable it will appear to Google.

A very useful tool for one page sites is a Google map. Google makes it possible to create a marker for any location, and embed the map in a website. The embedded map is more than simply an image of a map – it is interactive, and allows the user to zoom in and out, as well as use navigation controls to display different areas. York car valeting company KleenKar have this tool put to good use on their site:

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