Our Take on Search Engine Optimisation
Clients often ask how to get their sites to the top of Google. Here’s our answer:
Search engines find your site by following a link from another website. For new domains, this is often from our own portfolio pages. For existing domains (as in this case), search engines re-visit periodically to check for new pages & changes to old ones. Search engines visit popular sites more frequently.
How does a search engine decide which is a more popular site? This is the $64,000 question! There are many factors to this. Search engines don’t want people to be able to cheat their way to the top, so they don’t make their exact criteria public. The basics are:
- Number of links to your site from another site.
- The popularity of the sites which link to you.
- The wording of the link from another site.
- The correlation between the keywords on your site and those in links from other sites.
Our sites have unique, easy to ready URLs which you can copy, paste & send to people - this helps with (1). As we also describe your business in brief when linking from our portfolios, we also help with (2) & (3). We build sites with clear keyword correlation between page titles, URLs, ‘meta information’ (invisible page header keywords & description) and the actual content of the page. This helps enormously with (4).
Thereafter, you need to build up incoming links from other sites. Choose the keywords you want to optimise for and begin accumulating links from other sites using those keywords. It can take months before you see any benefit from this, as search engines tend to do large-scale updates only a couple of times a year. Our best advice is:
- Let us build a site which search engines can read, understand and find the right keywords.
- Ask your partners & associates to link to you from their sites.
- Be good at your job! Other people will talk about what you do and link to your website from elsewhere.
Further reading: How Google Works.