Search engines

How to build a search engine friendly website also known as search engine optimisation(optimization)

The following page tries to explain in simple terms how to get your website ranked highly in search engines. We do not make it a coat and daggers subject trying to make it more complicated than it is. Our message is that by following these rules your site will get ranked higher by the major search engines - its as simple as that. However you need to use a company that understands these rules and can implement them in the most efficient way.

Rule 1 -Content
Firstly the content of the website including key search phrases need to be visible to the search engines when they come to index the site. Such content that isn’t visible to search engines is Flash based content, content generated through javascript, content displayed as images etc.
If you have a current website that isn’t receiving a lot of traffic to it we can produce a report that shows the content that is visible to the search engines from your site.

The options then will be either for us to put in relevant content and populate each page with relevant keywords or if the site isn’t built in a search engine friendly way we can quote you on a redesign of the site.

Rule 2- Right keywords
The wise choice of the right keywords is the first and crucial step to  successful Search Engine Optimisation (optimization).If this part is wrong then the success of the site will be very hard going. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimise(optimize) for. Normally it is done by reviewing what the online population is searching for and what your competitors are using and then also including those that you see fit for your own site.

High ranking keywords
After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by, sometimes tens of thousands a day –that’s great but to compete against the sites using these keywords may be too costly to work towards.

Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition. As a result of this, it is possible with less effort and within budget to achieve much better results than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword. 

We can check and see the difficulty of some words.
For example you may want to use finance as a keyword or loans, mortgages, insurance etc.

Having checked we may see the keyword of finance has a very high difficulty of say 89% but loans has 63% difficulty, mortgage has 55% and insurance has 80% difficulty. In this instance it would make sense to concentrate on loans and mortgage.

Rule 3 - Links from other websiteS (also known as backlinks or inbound links)
Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimisation, that by not having any will totally affect the performance of the website. The best backlinks are those coming from a website with the same theme as your own website. The number of backlinks tells the search engines how popular or important your website is.
Backlinks are important for Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO) because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, It does this by considering these websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.


Rule 4 - Having correct URL redirects
A lot of sites lose traffic due to incorrectly configures redirects. It is very import that when a search engine comes to crawl your website it is able to follow any redirects set up.
Suppose you have a website http://www.abs.com and you create a redirect such that whenever any visitor types in the URL http://www.fabs.com he is automatically redirected to http://www.abs.com/widgets/, if the Search Engine is not able to follow the redirect it would think that http://www.abs.com has NO contents and so http://www.abs.com would end up ranking very badly in search engines.

Rule 5 - Age of the domain name
One of the many factors in Google's search engine algorithm is the age of a domain name. In a small way, the age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity and therefore a higher relevancy score in Google.

Two things that are considered in the age of a domain name are:

The age of the website AND
The length of time a domain has been registered

The age of the website is based on how long the content has been actually on the web, how long the site has been in promotion, and even the last time content was updated. The length of time a domain has been registered is measured by not only the actual date the domain was registered, but also how long it has been registered for. Some domains only register for a year at a time, while others are registered for two, five, or even ten years.

Google search engine gives importance to the age; age of incoming links, age of web content, and the date the domain was registered.
Google also gives new websites a waiting period of three to four months before giving it any kind of PageRank. This is referred to as the "sandbox effect". It's called the "sandbox effect" because Google wants to see if those sites are serious about staying around on the web. The sandbox analogy comes from the concept that Google does this by throwing all of the new sites into a sandbox and let them play together, away from all the adults. Then, when those new sites "grow up", so to speak, then they are allowed to be categorized with the "adults", or the websites that aren't considered new.

What does this mean for you? For those of you with new websites or considering a website we say there are other things to be doing in this time period. Primarily arranging your backlinks as previously described and promoting your site through Pay-per-click.

If these rules have been adhered to then when Google does finally assign you a PageRank, you could find yourself starting out with a great PageRank!