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Website Design Scotland

Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Search Engine Optimisation Case Study

How did Total Ecommerce get good at Search Engine Optimisation? In 1998, I took a postion with Scottish Enterprise advising Small Businesses in technology.  This was when the World Wide Web was starting to make an impression.

To maintain some credibility with my clients, I decided to put up a small website.  In no time, the website was on the first page of Alta Vista ... one of the top Search Engines of that time.  After a while, the site was at number 1. The website had no real focus, so I decided to build a website about one of my hobbies, gardening.

Town and City GardensThis web site was called www.mikesgarden.co.uk.  I used this as an example to my clients whilst working with Scottish Enterprise. 

Being an technology advisor for Perthshire Businesses, I had to be able to prove my theories about getting websites to the top of the search engines. 

The Garden web site started getting about 10 visitors a day.  That is what most small business websites get an a daily basis.  With some Search Engine Optimisation techniques employed in the garden site, over time the number of visitors increased and within the year, the site was getting 750 per day. 

In time, the website came top of the Goole search engine for a number of terms.  This got clients sitting on the edge of their seat hanging on to my every word.

Then I decided to exploit the traffic and put on a simple online shop. Within a week, I had my first sale. I increased the amount of information and products on the site and now the site is getting 2,500 unique visitors a day.

I have built a number of sites since whilst being an advisor for the government, and all of them performed very well. I now employ these clean techniques for my client base and they will soon be climbing the search engine result pages.  It will take new websites about 10 months to get reasonable traffic due to the amount of competition. So don't expect instant results.

The article below may be beyond your web skill, so if you want your website to work without nonsense, why don't you give us a call or drop us a mail. We will audit your site and give you a proposal of how much it will cost to make the site work on the major search engines.  Some sites only need a small tweak, others may need a rebuild.

Have a read and let us know your thoughts.

Correct use of words in the Title Bar - This is a very important part of your site. Search Engines use this to initially index your page. Use about 80 characters to describe you product with powerful keywords and phrases. To find the most useful words for a natural listing, go to www.wordtracker.com. Every page should have a dedicated title for the page content.


Copy - Search engines check the title bar and then the copy. If the words in the title bar do not match what is in the copy, your site can be marked as irrelevant. So the copy should hold the powerful keywords that are in the title. Those words should also be written to a density of about 5 to 8%.


Amount of Copy - Have at least 250 words on the page. The search engines can only really see text and not images. If there are only a few words or no words, the search engine has nothing to get its teeth into.


Visual Copy - Do not write large blocks of text as the visitor is looking for specific information when they arrive at your home page. Bullet point the information so the visitor can scan the page for the bits they are looking for. Make parts of each bullet point clickable.


Formatting - The important titles within the visible page should be formatted to H1. This makes the search agent home in on those words or phrases as important.
 

Font - Use text which is easy to read such as Arial or Verdana. Don't use Times New Roman as that can get sore on the eyes when it comes to projected light from a computer screen.


Page Rank - Links from other sites to yours. Sites who link to you should be complimentary to your product and they should be technically sound. Bad sites that link to you can bring your site down. Use http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/ to check the sites out. Get as many as you can, but it is quality over quantity.


Freshness of content - Ensure that you change some of the text as often as possible so that you add value to your visitors. If a page remains stagnant, the search engines will soon let you fall down the rankings.


Page size - Make sure that the pages load fast. Slow loading pages turn people off and remember that you competition is just one click away.


Internal Linking - Have loads of pages. Do not think that a 2 page website is going to work. At least 10 pages would be a better option. Link all the pages together using text linking so that the deep crawling search engines can spider the whole site. Help the spider by creating a site map.


Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO)

The use of search engine optimisation helps a web site to be found through internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).


By developing a web site to be search engine friendly and containing interesting content that other websites will want to share a link with, will increase your sites ranking results. This will mean that more visitors will find your website as it will be better placed! In the long run, this would be a better investment than using pay per click systems.


A properly optimised website will perform better with the major search engines. To ensure that we optimise properly, we follow the following processes ...

  • Simple Website design and development
  • Search engine friendly ecommerce .
  • Website link popularity
  • Web copy quantity and keyword density quality
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