Search engine optimisation

Being highly-ranked by Google, Yahoo and MSN is paramount to your website success.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) ensures that your website is well-indexed and ranks highly for your targeted keywords. Without good SEO, no-one will know your website exists.

You can have the best website in the world, but it's not going to be visited if no-one knows it's there, which is why high search engine rankings are important for any online venture. At Webthinking, we can help and advise on SEO matters, as well as ensuring the work we produce is optimised for good indexing and ranking.

Link-building SEO

Far and away the most important strategy in SEO, the theory and practice of link-building could make or break your website. Google and the other major search engines treat links as 'votes' for the respective website(s). For example, if Site A links to Site B, that is considered a vote for Site B by Site A. If Site A has a good PageRank, the vote for Site B is worth more than that of a lower value website.

With this in mind, the goal is to get as many links as you can from relevant websites with high PageRank. Without getting too detailed, it also worth noting that a page's PageRank is 'shared' between all the websites it links to. If, for example, Site A links to your website and four others, you will get one fifth of the 'vote' possible. There is obviously more to it than described here, but this is basic premise.

There are many companies that provide specialist link-building services, where they find and request links on your behalf, and we can recommend one to you on request.

Content optimisation

Without good content, there will no reason to visit your website, but, without good optimised content, you will not be indexed or ranked well. Search engines look at the text on your website and have to calculate what each page is about - writing optimised content will make this easier for them, so keep the following basic guidelines in mind when writing:

• Stick to one subject per page.
• Identify the keywords and phrases that people will be using to find your website and incorporate these into your text where possible.
• Resist the temptation to 'spam' keywords into your text, as search engines can detect this and you will be penalised.
• When inserting links into your text, ensure to use the title attribute:
  <a href="eggs.html" title="Eggs">Eggs</a>
• Don't forget to make your content read well for humans!

As with all aspects of SEO, there is more to it than this, but, hopefully, this will give you guidance in the beginning.

HTML optimisation

Once you have good links and good content, we need to make sure it can be read easily and cleanly by the search engines. Our SEO role for your website is to ensure HTML code is optimised and there are several things we do to help this.

HTML optimisation	Included
CSS designs for separated style and content Content is stored separately to style, so search engines can read just the content.
Heading tags (H1, H2...) used on every page
Optimised page title
Search-engine-friendly URLs For example, http://mysite.com/product/teabag instead of http://mysite.com/product/view.asp?productid=2374
Content is placed at the top of code to increase its prominence
Alt attribute for all images This is text that describes what the image is, as search engines cannot 'read' images.
Title attribute for all links Search engines look for this to determine what the linked page is about
Clean and concise code throughout

As and when we learn of new techniques for increased indexing and ranking potential, we incporate these ideas into our website designs. If you require a specialised SEO company, we can, again, recommend some to you on request.