Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SOE) appears to have become something of a hot topic in the web industry. Given that we’re in the business of providing websites to clients we decided to take a closer look at exactly what is happening, whether our own sites work well with this, and what is and is not good practice.
And the closer you look, the more that smoke and mirrors appear to being used. Quite honestly, we didn’t realise how bad things were. There are literally thousands of web design companies out there, and almost all of them appear to offer assistance in search engine optimisation.
Which is odd.
Because how the search engines actually work is a closely guarded secret.
Why the Big Secret?
Because people who offered search engine optimisation were effectively buying their clients’ way to the top of the rankings. And that’s not what search engines are about - they’re actually about searching the internet to find the most relevant information, not the best advertised. This concept of search engine neutrality is incredibly important. Not least because the search engines themselves actually make good money from advertising - if other companies can manipulate results like this then the search engine’s source of revenue will disappear as paid for adverts beome unnecessary.
So this leaves a huge question to be asked - what are these companies actually offering?
Well sometimes it’s a little hard to tell! What’s even worse, is that they’re often just using what is considered as best practice, and a little more knowledge than their clients, to show how good they are. And they’re not. A site gets to the top of search results by being important in the eyes of the search engines.
Being Important
Raising your site’s profile on the internet largely depends on how important to the internet your site is, and how pertinant to a searcher your site will be. If someone wants, say, a builder in St Helens then a search of “St Helens Builders” should come up with builders in St Helens. If you’re actually a builder, or a group of builders in St Helens, how would you get to the top of that search?
In concept it’s actually very easy indeed - you just need to make your website important to the searcher. Of course, that means more than just a website that says “Joe the builder, in St Helens.” But the term isn’t actually that common yet, believe it or not.
The first and most important thing to do is to get your site actually showing this information to the search engines. One of the simplest is to quite simply have your site saying that you’re a builder, that you’re in St Helens, and that you also cover other areas perhaps. You could even mention these, but don’t just do a big list - the search engines are wise to that, and it’s such a base idea that it doesn’t look good anyway. You won’t see IBM saying they do computer consultancy in a big list of placenames.
Instead, the key is to participate in the web and its interactivity. For example, you’re a builder… you should get involved in online forums and give advice about building. In doing so most people won’t mind your site address being included - especially if your site also includes help and advice and of course the words in your advice will become associated with the words on your website. The search engine’s spiders will find this information and add it to their indexes. You’re also more likely to find advice pages being linked to from other websites and forums - which again will dramatically improve your ranking.
Don’t go using Flash (a web content package) everywhere, without a text alternative to your site. Many web designers create Flash only sites for one reason, and one reason only… it’s easy. You can stick the page elements where you like, you can make the site scale, it can have gee-whizz graphical effects, and you can even add sound without any real effort. A lot of simpler Flash based sites could be created in a very short time indeed by a well trained monkey in just a couple of hours. Ok, it would be a very well trained monkey, but nonetheless….
The Problem With Flash
Flash is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to add visual drama to your site. It’s popular and well supported. But it’s not without big downsides. Many designers like to create a Flash based navigation bar on their websites. Great, except it makes the job of navigating your site pretty difficult for spiders unless other links are added. And someone using a mobile device to view your site will almost certainly get stuck.
As a consequence we don’t recommend Flash based navigation. At Interconnect IT we prefer to use css for navigation, sitting on top of plain html - this technology is highly compliant with web standards, easy to use and, most importantly, a cinch for the search engines’ spiders.
Are Interconnect IT Websites Well Optimised?
In our own opinion - yes! We create sites that are easy for the search engines to navigate and index, pages are always titled correctly, and fresh content is always easy to navigate. More specifically, our sites provide what are called RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it creates a protocol with which a piece of software can see when there has been an update to the website, and then download that particular update. The beauty of this is that your visitors can subscribe easily to your site but, even better, so can then the search engines. Make a change and the search engine will soon know about it, and have it indexed almost immediately.
We also never try to trick the engines into believing there is more to our site than there really is. This reduces the likelihood of ranking penalties, and also allows us to keep something of a moral highground.
Google Sitemaps
Another thing that can help hugely is for you to help Google along by providing a Sitemap. This describes your site to Google, gives it priority loading of pages on your site, and generally improves the quality of indexing. It may not increase your ranking, however. All our sites as from mid November 2006 have automatic sitemap creation built in. Whenever a change is made, the map is refreshed, and Google informed. From our experience so far, Google will usually check your site within a few minutes of the update.
Summary
At the end of the day, we’re professionals here. The company was established by two people who have been involved in the web since the very early days. We’ve seen how it’s developed, and we’ve seen how some aggressively commercial interests have actively sought to undo the good work of the early pioneers. The Internet’s ‘morals’ are very much based on the idea of co-operation and collaboration. Commercial interests that do not work like this will find that the underlying ethos of the internet will punish them. As a commercial organisation ourselves we firmly believe in conforming to the standards of the internet, and, we believe, this approach will help our clients to make the very most of the internet and its search engines.
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