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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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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