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Search Engine Optimisation

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Introduction

For our web development clients only, Diverse Internet Solutions can help elevate your website above the crowd, and your competitors, utilising our 24 years of search engine optimisation experience.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is available from many companies who specialise in the “art”. Some of those are reputable organisations but many are charlatans. Never trust an SEO "expert" who makes claims that they can get your website onto the first page in Google.

The key point to remember about SEO is that it is not “rocket science”, as some “experts” would have you believe.

Content is paramount

Search engines such as Google try to give the best experience possible to their visitors.

In order to provide accurate and appropriate search results to those visitors they attempt to match website content to the keywords and phrases that their visitors search on.

The best search engine optimisation technique is to ensure that your website helps the search engine in that endeavour by including in your website content that is rich and original, and which is incorporated and presented in a search engine friendly way.

The "secret" to good rankings really is that simple.

Three key elements

Search engines use three key determinants to “rank” a website in their indexes:

  1. Your website content and the way in which that content is arranged (or coded) within your website
  2. The amount of social media “sharing” connected to your website
  3. The number, and quality, of links to your website from other websites

The overwhelmingly most important of these is your website content, combined with the way it is arranged and coded.

Social media & inbound links

Social media sharing can be initiated and built up by your social media strategy, with our help, if required.

Incoming links grow organically with a professionally-developed, content rich website, though there are several steps you can take to encourage their proliferation.

However, social media sharing and incoming links are not under the direct control of the website owner, the website developer, or any SEO “expert”.

Short cuts are counter-productive

Many techniques used by SEO “experts” to artificially boost your rankings in these areas may give some short term benefits but often lead to your website being downgraded or penalised by Google in the longer term.

Once this occurs it is extremely difficult to “undo”.

So although hiring an SEO specialist may bring some added value, they can only suggest tweaks to your website and can only bring marginal gains, if any.

And there is a risk that techniques used to "trick" search engines into giving your website improved rankings could lead to penalisation in the medium to longer term.

Naturally search engine optimised

Sites developed by Diverse Internet Solutions are naturally, by design, optimised for search engines and will gradually rise in the rankings, so long as your content is original and comprehensive.

It is rarely, if ever, of any significant benefit to hire an external search engine optimisation specialist.

Please contact us for further information.

Included SEO features

one Responsive design

A “responsive” website is one which renders equally well on multiple device types with widely varying display sizes such as smartphones, tablets and desktop computers.

Google and other search engines strive to give their visitors the most useful search results possible. They therefore rank responsive websites more highly.

Because our new websites are all built in a responsive manner, they are ready for favourable ranking by search engines.

two Accessible design

The principles of “Accessible Design” ensure that a website is fully useable by people whose physical or mental condition affects their performance.

The design of our websites consider the need for accessibility and we follow the Web Accessibility Guidelines to ensure that your website is available to all visitors.

This is also an SEO factor as Google and other search engines rank websites that are built using accessible design principles more highly.

three Page names (URL's)

Another consideration of search engines is the readability of the URL of each page in your website.

Take for example the two URL's which point to the same product page on an ecommerce website: www.example.com/Green-People-Gentle-Cleanse and the same page which refers to the same product: www.example.com/Product.aspx?Product-ID=265.

It is much easier for a humans as well as search engines to understand what the content of the former page name (or URL) will be.

All the page names (URL's) on your website will be in this easily readable format favoured by search engines.

four Header tags

The way your content is organised and coded in your website pages affects the ability of search engines to understand the content in your pages and to match it to their visitor's keyword searches.

We code your website in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand your content.

This is achieved by various methods such as how far down particular content appears on your page and the emphasis given to headings and sub-headings which should match the keywords your potential visitors are likely to use to search for your website.

five Meta Tags

Meta tags are tags coded into your pages, invisible to the vistor, but which play a part in informing search engines about the content of your pages.

Because they are under the control of the website owner and could be designed to be deliberately misleading, search engines do not place as much importance on them as they used to.

However, it remains important to get them right and we ensure that they work advantageously for your website.

six Site map

To ensure that search engines are aware of each page on your website, we include a sitemap page, which also helps visitors navigate your site.

We also include an XML sitemap, not visible to visitors, which search engines download from your website. This ensures that they have the opportunity to index every page on your site

six Site map uploaded to Google

We actively submit your XML website map to Google so that they can begin to index them immediately, including any new pages or changes to existing pages.

Where you have a Content Management System (CMS) or an ecommerce website and you therefore create new pages in your website yourself, we include code to automatically send an updated XML sitemap to Google each time you create a new page (such as a product page) or change the name of an existing page.

Optional SEO features

one Social media

We are able to give you guidance, or can take on the task ourselves, of opening Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts.

Or, we can incorporate existing social media accounts into your website and marketing strategy.

The importance of these has grown now that Google gives higher rankings to websites that are regularly "shared" by visitors using social media.

two Google Rich Snippets and Structured Data

Rich Snippets are peices of code inserted into the HTML of your site designed to help Google understand your page content better, enabling us to have more control over how Google presents the content of your pages in it's search results.

This gives Google the opportunity give users a better sense of your content and why it's relevant to the users query. This is likely to result in more click throughs to your website.

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