Having your website SEO’d (Search Engine Optimized) is essential if you want people to be able to find it. There is little point in having a beautiful website if nobody can see it. It is not enough to simply make it live and hope that people will magically find it, they won’t. The search engines are not like yellow pages, they do not alphabetically list businesses. The websites at the top of the page are either there because they have paid to be there in the “sponsored listings” by using Adwords or they have been “search engine optimized” – made attractive to the search engine spiders and humans alike.
We offer existing businesses an “SEO Website Health Check”. We will pinpoint areas for improvement and recommend a solution to help increase traffic online. Simply take the finished report to your website designer for implementation.
It is a common misconception that all website designers are also well versed in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), – they aren’t necessarily. Here at CG Website Designs we can give you impartial advice to help your site improve its visibility.
There are many businesses offering SEO help, unfortunately not all SEO help is the same. Some unscrupulous companies may actually harm your business by using “black hat” SEO which is frowned upon by Google and the other big Search Engines. Here are just a few Bad SEO tricks that we suggest you stay well away from.
Many times you will see the promise “We will guarantee you get to the top of Google”
The truth is no one can do this, at least not 100% of the time. Google changes its algorithms daily making it impossible to achieve. However, you can get to the top of Google if you pay for it using Adwords. Do not be deceived into thinking that this is the best way to go. It will cost a fortune unless the person controlling the Adwords knows what they are doing. There are other free ways to get on the first page. Having your web pages optimised properly is good practice.
Even if they do get you on the first page in the beginning, it is well known that many new sites start off showing on the 1st page of Google only to then drop away to below the third page or worse some 2 months later – this is commonlyknown as being in the “sandbox”.
Here are some more examples of ”Black Hat SEO” . Using the following SEO techniques means that you will risk your site being deindexed or banned, never to appear again. Do Not Do It!
Hidden Text
Using an excess amount of keywords on a page, usually found at the bottom of the page, sometimes in pale colours, sometimes in the same colour as the background of the page (so on this page – white) to make them invisible. The keywords are there solely to trick the search engines, they are of no use to humans at all. This technique will work for a while and then one day your site will disappear from the search index never to be seen again. You can check to see if a site has done this by looking at the source code. – Click the right mouse button and then “View Source” .
Keyword Stuffing
To write content with an excess amount of the same keyword in it, the best way is to keep your main keywords to between 2 – 5 times per article. Some websites and website designers may also put a lot of keywords at the bottom of the page, sometimes as urls sometimes not. Invariably you will discover that if you click on one of these urls, it takes you to the same page that you are one. We have seen this quite often on other design sites. This is done solely to trick the search engines into making that site come higher up the search engine rankings. Although tempting, you do this at your own risk.
Doorway Pages
This is a page that you cannot access from the navigation and serves no useful purpose whatsoever other than to get the attention of search engine browsers who, having clicked on the url find nothing of use to them.
Link Farms
Link farms are an absolute no, no. The sole purpose of a link farm is to exchange links with other websites and make it look as if the site is popular, they are no use at all and will get you banned. Never pay for a link unless you know the site that the link is coming from.
SEO Advice Package
We offer the following Search Engine Optimization advice and health check on existing websites. We will check that your website is using the correct meta tags and suggest ways you can increase your traffic and visability, both online and offline.
- Page Title Tags Generation
- Keyword Research and Selection
- META description and marketing tags
- Geographical target market tags
- Content suggestions
- Suggestions on how to increase visibility
- Submission to top search engines and directories (if not already done)
By doing the above your site will improve it’s “Search Engine Friendliness” and drive quality, targeted traffic to your site which will turn into quality, targeted leads.
