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As web designers and developers, we’ve obviously been involved with SEO constantly, but for years we resisted the temptation to jump on the bandwagon and claim to be ‘Search Engine Optimisation Specialists’.

The reason, if I’m honest, is that we knew we  couldn’t guarantee quality results in the same way we could with our other services. In fact we were never quite sure how companies claiming to guarantee results could – we felt they must be using decidedly dodgy techniques (effectively spamming), which is a highly risky strategy. On top of that, we’d  countless experiences of sites doing really well in search engines and then inexplicably dropping in the rankings overnight, due to the ever secretive Google changing their algorithms on a whim without any documentation or release information.

You can imagine this can cause problems with clients needing instant explanations! Thankfully, almost invariably, with a little investigation, head scratching and tweaking we can restore the site’s position.

But ultimately, why we never felt comfortable claiming to be SEO specialists is that we don’t think SEO is a ‘specialist’ service – it is so intertwined with everything we do, and needs to be considered as part of the whole picture. So after years of watching and learning, monitoring and analysing our sites and what effects what, and – at the end of the day some very impressive SEO results for our clients, here is the plain english Binamic guide to SEO:

1. Firstly – you must have a strategy: What are you trying to achieve with your site? Who are your target audience? What do they need, and how can you give it to them in the easiest possible way? How are they searching, and with what keywords? Without these starting blocks, it’s easy to go round in circles…
2. Google tries to recommend sites that it thinks are going to be relevant and useful to the searcher. If your site is genuinely useful and relevant you are probably 70% of the way there already. So this is the first thing we look at: build a great site – we would never attempt SEO on a site that was useless – even if we could, what would be the point?
3. Quality of coding. Search engine crawlers have to be able to read and make sense of the content of your site to be able to add it to their databases in a meaningful way. There are, thankfully, web coding standards (although you’d be surprised how many coders still ignore them) which, if adhered to go along way to helping here. If a site contains content held in database (eg a product catalogue on an e-commerce site) then is is imperative that this can be accessed by the search engines too – again often overlooked.
4. Naming of files and pages. This is probably the single most influential way you can tweak the site to increase your rankings – including the domain name. So, for example: carparts.co.uk/subaru/forester/brake-pads.htm stands a much better chance of being found is someone is searching for a…erm.. ‘brake pad car part for Subaru Forester’ than a URL like, say: robertsandco/132/22/index.htm (by the way – both these URLs are ficticious!).
5. Regularly updated content. This is linked in to point 2, but is very important. If you site contains content that is relevant and useful and current, Search engines will love it. Key words and phrases need to be considered (as do the way they are coded in to the site, but that’s our job), but actually – as long as it’s relevant, it is still powerful – it can pull in useful traffic from unexpected quarters
6. Links IN to you site. The holy grail is to have authoritative sites involved your area of business linking to your site – if lots of people link to your site, then the search engines assume it must be a good site and rank it higher. Now you may be able to achieve this by having good contacts in your network and asking them to link to you – or of course you might achieve this organically by having such a good site that people want to link to it!

Now – what most Search Engine Optimisation companies will do is manufacture and manipulate and cajole the above in to your site, to convince the search engines your site is great and deserves to be ranked highly.

But our approach is slightly different: Actually build great, relevant and useful sites with all of the above, and the rest just falls in to place!

That way – not only do you get the traffic you desire, but when people get there, they are not disappointed – and that is good news for any business.

Comments

1. Tweets that mention SEO: Search Engine Optimisation in the real world | Binamic -- Topsy.com

   November 23, 2009
   6:40 am

   [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Andy Pearson, My Mustard. My Mustard said: Search Engine Optimisation in the real world http://tinyurl.com/yk37pg4 [...]

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