Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A Note about SEO, Honesty and Trickery
You might notice that on this page you will not see any included specifics about meta keywords or other "quick tricks" that some "SEO Firms" will try to sell you on. The truth of the matter is that there are no quick tricks with SEO, and anybody that even mentions meta-keywords is either 5 years behind on SEO or is deceiving you. Similarly, firms that attempt to sell you on any sort of link-building package are generally worthless.
SEO is not a dark art, nor is it rocket science. It really comes down to having excellent content, coded cleanly and semantically and having a website that is properly designed. The primary goal of SEO is to not only “feed” content to just Search Engines, but to provide content that will help Search Engines clearly see your main keywords and also provide content human readers will find useful.
Here is the one of the best rules for SEO: provide unique content human readers will enjoy and find useful and you will create enough of a following that will in turn "please" the Search Engines. Don't just try to "trick" the Search Engines (because you won't as they get smarter), but instead focus on good useful content to your viewers.
Feel free to contact us to find out more about results with SEO.
On-Page Optimization
Contrary to what most SEO firms would lead you to believe, on-page optimization is the single most effective SEO you can do. SEO...what exactly does that mean?
Your website will be designed with an “eye” toward Search Engine Optimization. We design our websites up to SEO standards enabling Search Engines to more efficiently index the site thereby helping the site follow the criteria set out by Google and other search engines for a streamlined website (from an SEO view). In SEO coding, the goal is to produce lean, table-less, W3C XHTML standard compliant, CSS coding with proper placement of keywords in the coding thus "helping" search engines understand what is the most important aspect of the content.
Technical Aspects of SEO
Examples include (and are not limited to) using:
- h1, h2, etc. tags for keywords (properly placed and proper frequency) to "help" search engines understand what are the most important words on the page. These are the larger and more bold text you see on pages.
- Adding the correct keywords to your description tags in the <head> component of the coding not really for the Search Engines per se, but more for the human readers who will be searching through the Search Engine results after searching for a specific keyword.
- Putting Keywords in:
- bold tags
- italic tags
- list tags
- Using the Title tags correctly to produce an optimized combination (text at the top of your browser)
Researching the proper balance of keywords for this page (too many is considered spam, too little is considered ineffective).
- Using "alt" and "title" tags on images using the keywords. This is something that we do only sparingly when the there is a reason to do so. We advise being careful about this as to not to try and deceive or trick Search Engines.
- Installing a sitemap.xml page that will be submitted to the search engines. This "sitemap.xml" page will help the search engines more efficiently search your site to gather content for indexing purposes. All websites we do optimize, we submit the sitemap.xml to the "Big 3" (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) for crawling. See an example of our XML sitemap.
- Use of SEO-friendly URLs.
- Avoiding Canonicalization.
- Positioning the keywords at the top of the body in the HTML to clue in the search engines that this content is high in the positioning of the page (above the fold) and is therefore important in content.
- Using White hat techniques vs. Black hat techniques (ethical SEO work vs. unethical SEO work...read more about this suject: White hat versus Black hat). We use White hat techniques. Black hat techniques can land you in hot water with Google and other search engines.
- Javascript and CSS styles called from external sheets (no inline) separating content from attributes (another way to lean down code for SEO purposes).
- SEO friendly navigation (list based CSS)...no image based navigation. Again, this way of designing the navigation is great for SEO.
“I really enjoyed working with Kris. He is professional, trustworthy and follows through with what he promises. I was completely satisfied with the work that he completed for me. I would definitely work with Kris again.”