Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Kent
Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising the source code and content of a website and utilising ‘off-site’ methods to give as high a ranking as possible for each website page within the leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. For specialised Kent industries, optimisation may involve aiming to achieve high rankings in industry specific search engines and listings.
There are two methods of improving the ranking of websites known within the SEO industry as ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’.
Black Hat SEO involves using any technique known to improve a ranking even if the techniques used are considered ‘unethical’ within the search engine industry. Examples of unethical techniques are using repeated key words and phrases where the text is coloured white on a white background, or serving one version of a website page to the search engines and a totally (or partly) different page to human visitors, or adding your site into link farms (see inbound-links discussion later on).
White Hat SEO involves only using techniques which are approved by the major search engines to improve the rankings. Obviously there are some techniques (‘grey hat’?) which come somewhere between the two definitions. White Hat SEO Kent techniques include; putting key words into the TITLE and DESCRIPTION HTML tags, and adding links into client websites from reputable and relevant external websites. We use White Hat SEO techniques to improve the ranking of client websites. This enables us to sleep easily knowing that our client websites will not be banned from the major search engines, but White Hat techniques also usually result in more accessible website designs (search engines access websites in the same way as the text readers used by visually impaired website users) and in the long run are likely to outperform Black Hat techniques as less remedial work will be needed to reinstate banned sites into the main search engine listings.
A project we are currently working on is folkestone driving lessons. Examples of Kent search engine optimisation tasks performed by us are:
Increasing inbound-links to your website.
One of the key ways that Google and other major search engines assess the importance of your Kent website is to look at who is linking to your website (inbound-links) and how important they are. For example, if a highly regarded website such as the BBC links to your website from their homepage then the search engines will treat that as a vote of importance for your own site. Included in this calculation is relevance, for example a link from an important sports reference site into a sports club will have more value than a link from an important real estate site into the same sports club.
Website optimisation.
The TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags in particular are used by search engines to find the most important words and phrases (known as your keywords and keyphrases) for that page on your website and so need to be carefully formulated to maximise their impact. Other areas such as use of the H1 and P tags for content need to be optimised, as well as removing bloated code and minimising use of on-page javascript etc. Internal linking is another important area to ensure that search engines can actually find all your content. As outlined earlier, most of the onsite optimisation tecniques also have a benefit in reducing source code size (faster loading), improving accessibility (correct use of HTML tags), and making the site easier to navigate (improved internal linking).