What is SEO?
The process of enhancing a websites visibility and search engine rank leading to improved position for a relevant search. 90% of searchers do not proceed beyond the first 3 pages of results, therefore to attract visitors Search Engine Optimisation is a pivotal part of building and maintaining a website.
Do I need SEO for my website?
Search Engines match a searchers request with a list of relevant websites, if your website does not appear highly placed, or worse it doesn't feature at all, why have a website ? Your competitors optimised websites will be returned by the search engines and divert your potential customers to their site.
How are websites returned?
The search engines use a program know as a 'spider' (also called a 'crawler' or 'bot') which continually crawls websites, a summary of content is indexed on the search engines database. During a search, a direct comparison between the searchers query and the indexed content is made, the search engine returns the most relevant matches in the form of a list.
Unless a website has been crawled and indexed by the relevant search engines, the website will not be displayed to a relevant search.
Has my website been crawled?
The SEO Tools section provides the necessary means to determine which search engines have indexed your web pages.
My site has not been indexed
Goggle, Yahoo and MSN accept free submission to their database index. Only the home page requires submitting to the search engine, the rest of the website will automatically be crawled should the website be search engine friendly. Refer to the SEO tips section to determine if your website is search engine friendly.
Search engines can take a number of months before crawling your website and there is no guarantee that all the search engine will crawl and index a website. Re-submitting a website will not speed the indexing process or improve your websites position, although repeated submissions of individual web pages within the website may result with the submission been blocked.
MONEYBACK GUARANTEE
AW Website Development provide a full refund to website owners where a poorly performing website has shown no improvement in placement for the agreed keyword / phrases, for the first 12 month period where the monthly subscription option has been undertaken.
Ethical SEO (White Hat)
Ethical SEO is quite simply complying the search engine guidelines.
As all the search engine guidelines are dynamic, they are regularly updated. Any good SEO webmaster will frequently check the individual search engine guidelines to keep up to date with any changes. Typically the guidelines are relevant for all of the search engines, although Google provide greater detail within their guidelines :-
- Use semantic HTML and relevant textural content
- Every page must be link able using static text
- Create relevant context rich web pages
- Websites are for your users not search engines
- Use text instead of images for important information
The most important factor to remember about search engines is that their spiders can only read text, if important information regarding your site is detailed in images, animation or video, the search engine can not read it.
Unethical SEO (Black Hat)
'Black hat' SEO is the manipulation of search engines and the exploitation of the search engine technology to obtain an unfair advantage.
The search engines take a harsh view on such practices and when the deception is detected websites are penalised and even completely blocked from the relevant search engines.
Re-instatement of website is a lengthy process of rebuilding trust with the search engines, your website is unlikely to appear during this process.
Black hat techniques include :-
- Hidden text or hidden links
- Web pages with irrelevant content
- Keyword stuffing or stacking
- Multiple pages of the same content
- Cloaking or deceptive re-directs
- Page swapping or jacking
- Backward links via link farms
- Doorway or information pages.
