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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Buttonbag

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.

Buttonbag is currently at position #1 for searches on google.co.uk for “sewing kits for children” and “children’s sewing kits”, but “children’s craft kits” is lagging behind a little at position #3, and “craft kits for children” at #2.

We will be adding some new offsite SEO links. Combined with the site’s existing onsite SEO, these should lift its position.

Shepherd’s Huts

Furniture For Life is a company specialising in high quality handmade furniture. As an offshoot of this business, they build shepherd’s huts – reproductions of miniature homes on wheels traditionally used by shepherds in the nineteenth century as they moved their flocks to new grazing. Today these are becoming popular as garden offices, hideaways, garden retreats and summerhouses.

The Shepherd’s Huts site was originally created by the business owner using free website software. Before we started work, it was at position #70 in Google results for “shepherd’s hut“.

When we added some SEO content, we ran into a software-related obstacle. It became apparent that the software used by the client was not compatible with updating files that had been changed remotely. This was going to make it impossible for the site’s owner to make updates without overwriting the onsite SEO.

It also became apparent that the software used to create the site generated the navigation using Javascript. As a result, Google was unaware of all but the home page. The site needed to be recoded.

Since the recode, the site has risen dramatically and is now at the top of page two for a google.co.uk search for ‘shepherd’s huts‘. As more links take effect, we should see it on page one.

David Bellis

David Bellis specialises in wedding photography in York, as well as portraiture and various other photographic forms. He created his website using software that produces sites in Flash. Flash is generally unreadable by search engines, as the text is embedded in the Flash file and, from an SEO point of view, may as well not be there at all. Before we worked on the site, it did not appear anywhere on the first 25 pages of Google search results for “York photographer“, “wedding photographer in York” or any other similar phrases.

The software used to create this site does provide some basic SEO opportunities: it allows the user to insert page titles, and meta tags containing keywords and a description. However, it duplicates these on every page of the site, which is not good SEO practice, as search engines favour sites in which each page has unique titles, keywords and descriptions.

There was also an existing static splash page on the site. This was written entirely in html, so had more potential for including SEO content. We added title and meta tags, and a few paragraphs of written content, so that there was something for search engines to read. This onsite SEO was combined with offsite SEO links.

Since we added the optimised splash page and offsite SEO links, the site jumped to a position on page 4 for ‘york photographer‘ even before Google had properly re-indexed the recoded site.

Google has now re-indexed the recoded site, and it is currently towards the top of page two for ‘york photographer‘. It should rise further as Google indexes the offsite links.

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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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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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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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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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The higher a website appears in search engine results the greater the number of visitors.

For example: a builder located in York would like to be at the top of Google for “York builders”, “builder in York”,  “building contractor York” and similar searches.  The builder also has other phrases for which they would like a high position:  “house extensions in York”, “York attic conversions”, “property renovation York” and so on.  The builder also operates in nearby locations: Leeds, Harrogate, Hull etc. and would like high positions in Google for these localities too.

Google is the most popular search engine.  Google is usually used as the benchmark for a site’s SEO.  Where Google goes the other search engines usually follow.

An SEO project involves:

1. Working with the client to identify the primary phrases for which a high Google position is essential, and other phrases for which a high Google position is desirable.
2. Targeting phrases at different pages of the client’s website by making changes to the underlying website code (HTML) and content (the words that appear on the  page) in order to optimise pages for their allocated phrases.
3. Identifying and correcting issues that are barriers to optimisation.  For example, some sites are driven by content management systems (CMS) which don’t allow the website code to be fully optimised. In such cases the CMS would removed or replaced.
4. Setting up links from other websites to the targeted pages using the target phrases as the linked text.

Steps 1 – 3 are known as “on-site” SEO. Step 4 is known as “off-site” SEO.

Off-site SEO involves links to the target site from other good quality sites.  These links are usually, but not necessarily, reciprocal. A links page is set-up on the target site and other sites approached to “exchange” links.  Sites are chosen which complement rather than compete or detract from the site being promoted.

Often a client will already have a number other firms they do business with who will be happy to exchange links.  A builder might work with a plumber, an electrician, a surveyor, and an estate agent who have websites and can be approached regarding link exchange.

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Another new site undergoing some off-site SEO treatment is for the Haxby Group Medical Practice, who are based in the outskirts of York but are now extending and will have doctors in Hull at three new surgeries opening between autumn and Christmas 2009. This site was designed by Mode and coded by Semlyen IT.

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