Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just as important as the design of your website. The design is what attracts customers to your website, keeps them looking at it, and hopefully persuades them to choose your company to purchase products or services from. SEO does exactly the same, but for the search engines. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo (now part of Bing) look at your site and decided when to show it in search results based on the content. This isn’t all though. They also look at the structure of your website, including internal and external links, the page names, and titles and descriptions to decide how important your site is in its category.
A website can be optimized for the search engines during building or afterwards; however it is preferable to do it during the website development. Here at Brynin Enterprise we work hard to build the site with integrated optimization, because if a website is not ready for the search engines we haven’t finished the job you are paying for. Optimizing a website for the search engines later can be costly. Even the cheaper firms charge £300 per month, and many firms seem to know little and charge a lot. The search engines are always changing how they work, especially Google, and the algorithms which they work from are more closely guarded secrets than the codes needed for the US President to authorize the firing of a nuclear missile.
This is how one of our representatives recently explained it to a client:
“Google is incredibly complex, and I’m only scratching the surface of how they work, because it’s very complicated. They actually use a mathematical algorithm to decide what to show. I’ve seen their old algorithm, and assuming the up-to-date version is more complicated, it’s a few hundred characters of seemingly random symbols, letters, and numbers just to decide what to show you. It is, in reality, mostly a guessing game.”
It’s impossible to know exactly what they are looking for, although they do provide guidelines which they generally keep to if we do. The biggest problem is that they sometimes release major updates which can invalidate years of SEO, as Google did on 23 February 2011 when they released their largest update so far affecting 12% of websites (figure from Google, gleaned from seomoz.org – full article here).
We do not provide SEO services on pre-existing websites; however we suggest Eco Seo whom we have worked with in the past with great success. An SEO firm will usually only tell you what needs to be done, but not provide the services to actually implement the changes. If you make contact with an SEO firm and find that changes need to be made, and you are unable to make the changes yourself, we will work with the SEO firm to make the necessary changes at our usual prices (see here).