What’s involved in Search Engine Consultancy?
White hat SEO
In our role as your search engine consultants, Wizzy Design will use several technical and editorial techniques to boost your ratings within Search Engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The specific group of techniques used by Wizzy Design in their Zenith Search Engine Optimisation Service are known as White hat search engine optimisation techniques.
White hat Search Engine Consultants will always aim to improve your site without breaking any editorial guidelines or the rules of any of the search engines, and this process will build up your search engine position with virtually no chance of repercussions should a search engine discover that some SEO Consultants are cheating the system.
Effectively, white hat SEO techniques are viable for the long term and represent a very low risk strategy. These white hat techniques can take a while to kick in for highly desirable key phrases however, which is why a commercial relationship with a true white hat search engine expert may last years.
Black Hat SEO is mainly a quick fix approach to getting to number one and revolves around exploiting faults in the way that search engines index their pages. Wizzy Design don't do black hat, but we do have a page outlining some of the black hat SEO cheats that have been used over the years.
What are these white hat SEO techniques?
We are happy to describe the techniques that we use, mainly because they generally have to be implemented by experts such as ourselves, but we feel that you should understand what we are trying to achieve with our work.
Keyword and key-phrase calculations
As a first step, we'll take your key phrases from you and appraise how competitive they are for you, thus giving you a realistic view of what we can do for you. You should plan your key phrases based upon what you think users will type into a search engine to find your product or service.
We'll discuss which key-phrases link to which pages, and work with you to decide what your main landing pages or key products are.
At this stage, we may also suggest key phrases that are more likely to generate traffic for you.
Technical tasks
These tasks involve adjusting the programs and resources of a website to ensure that they are as technically perfect as possible. If your website uses complex software such as a CMS or an eCommerce system, some avenues may be closed to us, however we can appraise this on a task by task basis since our programmers are able to work with ASP, ASP.NET, PHP and PERL.
We'll generally optimise the home page first, followed by any identified landing pages, then any other pages in small groups.
Configuration of Google Analytics
To give us some background statistics for your website, and to ensure that we can measure performance over time, we will configure a Google Analytics account for you. You will be able to log in to monitor your website performance too.
W3C Validation of HTML/XHTML and CSS
One of the first things to achieve with respect to search engine optimisation is to get the search engine to index all of your pages, this gives us a lot more pages to work with (and, in a roundabout way, a better importance score for your website).
Search engines, like other pieces of software that process web pages, read them according to the standards laid down by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This means that if we can get your site to be web standards compliant, the search engine will have a better chance of indexing all of your pages.
Creation of machine readable site maps and robot control files
Google, Yahoo and Bing are able to read specially formatted site maps. In this way, we can ensure that each search engine can find every page in your site.
The robot control file tells search engines how to read the site, we can ensure that certain areas are either read or not read depending upon our strategy for your site.
Optimisation of Title and HTML meta-tags
The title and meta tags all have to be checked or changed such that they work in harmony with the content on the page. For this to work, each optimised page must have at least 150 words of text. In the first instance, this text must come from you, the client; however we may change it in future stages.
Meta tags generally contain a page's description and keywords which must have much in common with your page's contents. Changes to content may involve changes to the title and meta data too.
Optimisation of keyword density
Once the site is fully indexed and the Meta data set up, we have to look at incorporating your key phrases into the site. Certain items within the page are very useful for this purpose, i.e. headings, bold text and hyperlinks.
We'll ensure that your heading structures are correct, and that key phrases are placed into your site (requiring changes to the content). In addition we'll ensure that hyperlinks are added where necessary and that key phrase rich page names are used (requires structural changes to the site).
In addition, we'll ensure that all your images have the alternative text property set (usually used for accessibility), which has a great impact upon search engines too.
Note: This is not a full web accessibility service. Please ask us about making your site accessible to blind or disabled users.
Optimisation of site and navigation structure
Once all of the above stages are completed, customers should be arriving at your site, but analysis of web site usage, in particular which page is being hit for specific search key phrases, may show that further changes are necessary.
Over time, we are able to move where a key phrase lands on your site by altering the web of hyperlinks within your own site. This is a process known as page rank modelling.
Link building tasks
Link building involves getting other sites to link to your site using the link text that we supply. There are several strategies to achieve this and some of the simpler ones will start immediately.
Link building is hugely important for any web site, since incoming links (in so far as Google is concerned) literally add importance to your site.
Free directories
There are many free search directories that Google will read. We will locate directories relevant to your web site and add your site to such directories.
Paid Listings
Unsurprisingly, there are many paid search listings directories, and we will locate and suggest directories that would be helpful for you to be listed in. The choice of whether you join these lists is down to you.
Articles and News Syndication
New content is always a big draw for web users, and so if you can publish interesting new articles or news on your site it would be a big help. We can also employ journalists on your behalf to write the stories for you.
These articles can be linked to other people's blog-spaces (Blogger, Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc). Each time someone blogs your article, your site gets an incoming link.
RSS feeds info here
Self promotion via Blogs
In the early stages, or if you become a prolific blogger, you can write articles on blogs that link back to your website, products, news or articles etc. Again, we can employ writers on your behalf to ensure that updates to your site get blogged around the world.
Links pages / Invitation to cross link
A further strategy is to offer an outgoing link for relevant incoming links, i.e. a website owner would offer you a link, and you'd give him one. In truth, outgoing links can weaken your site, so in all fairness this is a weak strategy and is only written here for completeness.
Marketing tasks
The result of technical SEO and Link building will be that much higher numbers of visitors will come to your site, and as a result, sales conversions should also increase by a similar amount.
Advertising and Direct marketing
One aspect of marketing is to undertake physical advertising or paid online advertising. In-house, we can organise visuals for posters or mail-outs, and we can also organise online advertising for you. We can also sort out links with companies that carry out direct-sales operations for you and companies that design and build show-stands and visual aids, but that is beyond the scope of this page – please ask us if you are planning to be present at a trade-show and need banners etc, or read about our graphic design service.
Using your website to sell your products
In terms of SEO, we act whenever you have plenty of visitors and would like to increase the sales conversion rate. We can suggest how your site might be improved in terms of design, content or features, and we can organise graphic design, web updates and content authoring on your behalf.
Search engines can change
In an attempt to be completely open about the search engine optimisation problem, we should inform you that search engines can change, and they do so without any regard for the investment that you have made in terms of your search engine marketing.
At the time of writing, the techniques described above are generally accepted to be fair and safe, meaning that any subsequent rewrite of the software (particularly Google's search algorithm) should not greatly affect your rank.
You will see that our Zenith SEO service allows clients to halt the SEO process whenever they are happy with the results, however it would generally be the case that you as our client would want to re-assign us to your SEO problem should software changes or actions by your competitors change your position in the search engine.