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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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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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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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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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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Also in the property area,  York student accommodation specialists Levi Dale Lettings have a new website profiling their  portfolio of managed student and non-student properties in the York, Selby, Goole, Malton and Whitby areas, which is currently undergoing a thorough SEO treatment.

In yet another area of the property market, high-end York letting agents City Lets have recently commissioned some social media integration in the form of Facebook and Twitter feeds. These will not only include company news and updates, but will also feature an automated property details feed. New properties posted on the City Lets website will be automatically posted in the City Lets Twitter and Facebook streams.

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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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