Website Search Engine Optimisation
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| Given the
quality and plentiful contextual content of your proposed
website AI&I
believe you should meet your customers on the first page of
any search engine results page using relevant search criteria
applicable to your line of business and we work towards
nothing less than your website being listed in the top-ten
search engine results.
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| What that means
is that potential customers searching the internet using the
search criteria "builders near Carcassonne", or "accountants
in Dorset" or "Independent Financial Advisers in Surrey"
should see your website listed on the first page of Google,
Yahoo and Live Search if those businesses descriptions are
applicable to you and your business. |
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| Simple in
theory but more difficult in practice and that's why we're
here to help with our website optimisation techniques or
"SEO" as it's called in our industry. We get your website
noticed by the major search engines and ultimately, your
potential customers. |
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Website Authoring and Best Practice.
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We use acceptable
website optimisation techniques to ensure that the best possible
page ranking and search engine results position is obtained
by your website content. Without exception, we do not use methods
that are contrary to website authoring guidelines issued to
AI&I by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and
Live Search.
In other words, we play by their rules which means your website
is not marked-down, demoted or deleted entirely from their indices
by using "black-hat" website authoring methods used to temporarily boost your
website positioning or relative importance. Trying to trick the
search-engines is short-lived and inevitably, futile. And, it
provides a bad browsing experience for people surfing the web
looking for what they want to find. |
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Website optimisation - What's involved?
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We absolutely love
customers that have a lot to say (and write about) their business.
This is very important "fuel". Good quality content and lots
of it, is essential for a potential customer to experience whilst
browsing your website and provides fuel for the search engine
robots to help them decide whether you should be at search-engine-results-position-number-10
with lots to say about your business, or position number 100
with nothing much to say (or promote) about your business!
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Simply stating that you are an accountant in Hampshire or a
builder in Surrey with a few pictures and a few paragraphs of well-spoken
words is now, not enough. If you have more good quality content
on your website than the other accountant in Hampshire or the
other builder in Surrey then you will, unsurprisingly, float
near the top of the pages which are offered-up by the search engines
to your potential customers searching the web for your products
or services. |
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Building
Links and a Good Neighbourhood.
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| Link building
is important. A hyper-link to your website is like a vote
for your website. The more votes you have indicate to the
robots that your website is worth something. Better still,
and more valuable, are the votes you get from your own
industry sector and even better than that, are links or
"votes" from your industry sector from their home-page,
which is usually their most important page. One-way links to
your website rather than reciprocal links are also
invaluable. The robots place value on the actual links
themselves. If you link to a neighbourhood of links (a link
farm) then this might be viewed poorly. Or you hide links,
or you link to a website that has a dubious reputation or
uses techniques to artificially increase it's importance or
relevance, then that will count against you. The message
here is be careful with who and with what content you link
to. |
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Maps, Meta-tags & Robots.
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"Behind" every
website page are technical things which help the visibility
of that page with the search engines. Getting these wrong or
leaving them out will not help your page positioning.
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Website Submission to Search Engine Indices.
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You can tell the whole World about your
website by trying to submit your website to every search engine
that exists, and we can do that if you wish at no additional
cost to those search-engines that offer free website
submission, but in practice and in our experience, if your
website is properly indexed and running smoothly in Yahoo!,
Google and MSN (Microsoft's Live Search) then the rest will
get to know about you anyway, in a very short space of time.
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| That said, there are certain circumstances when we would
recommend the submission of your website to very specific search
engines. |
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Search Engine Artificial Intelligence and Website Optimisation.
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Search engines
are constantly evolving using artificial intelligence and changing
their algorithms (the way they evaluate your website) to finely hone their users search experience.
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Each search-engine places slightly different emphasis on aspects
of your website to enable them to rank your website and so place
your website on the top, in the middle or at the bottom of the
their pack (SERPS). They use things called "robots" to do
that and data collection process is completely automated.
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So think of search engine optimisation (SEO) as an
examination question paper containing 100 questions and the
correct answers to the questions are in having the proper
website design, content and technical attributes in place to
rank well and be top of their class for that search term or
phrase. The search engine robots (who report back to their
respective search-engine owners who sent them) will look for
your "answers" and if they are missing or the answer is
incorrect, inappropriate or ineffective, then it will not
add to your overall score of page importance or "page-rank". |
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The Search Engine Optimisation Conclusion.
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| We have
described SEO or Search Engine
optimisation in it's simplest form. There is far more to this
specialist area of website production but it gives you an idea
of what needs to be done to a website to be at or near the top
of a search-engine results page. Creating good content does involve a lot
of work by the customer, afterall we can't be an authority and
write reams about an industry we know very little about. But
the customer can, and they should if they want to be (and stay)
near the top of the pack. The rest of the enhancement and
technical details are our responsibility, but without good
quality content and lots of it, we cannot deal you a winning
search-engine hand! |
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Website Content Authoring.
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If you are slightly
put-off by the thought of having to write exhaustively about
your business, then don't be. This is your opportunity to show
the whole World, quite literally, how good you are and how your
potential customers should choose doing business with you rather
than your competition. How many words per page is a tough
question but we'll tell you when we think it's enough and
that depends on your market-sector. |
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With new websites, we will prompt you with a list of headings under which you can
describe the features and benefits of your business and the
experience which people will enjoy by becoming your customer.
Also added, are sundry page headings that further enhance the
user experience and search-engine ranking thereby boosting customer
confidence which should turn more page views (potential customers
browsing your website) into business sales (conversion rate).
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When and where you write up the content is up you. Rather than reading
the newspaper or doing the crossword, get your notebook out
and make a start. You'll be surprised just how quickly it
begins to take shape. And keep a notebook handy during the
working day where you can jot down ideas about website
content that will spring to mind. |
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Naturally, we can't be too specific about everything that
needs to be done to make your website outperform your
competitor on this website because that knowledge is
AI&I's expertise.
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Why should I bother getting my website optimized?
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Five years ago, the world-wide-web was
a much, much
smaller place and any website around then was a "big fish in a small sea". Nowadays, with hundreds of websites being added
to the WWW every day, competition is intense. Search
engines are far more choosy about who they select to be
on the first page of search engine results. Today's search
engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Live Search analyse the content, architecture and relevancy of
that content at every level on every page and in microscopic detail.
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The need for higher website production standards to stay
competitive.
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So the need for higher standards in the production
and publication of websites has never been as
important. If you care about your website and it has
proven to have been a useful business tool, but in
last year or so you've seen it drop down the
search-engine results pages and customer enquiries
from it are on a decline then maybe you should
consider instructing us to give your website a
"tune-up" or rather, optimize it. You take your car
into the workshop for a full-service and a tune-up,
so why not your website? |
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So, if you are quite happy with your existing
website but you think it needs optimizing to bring
it up to speed, invite us to give you a quote. |
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We don't seek to change the look and feel and "re-brand"
your business unless you think the time is right to do that.
For website optimisation, we are more interested in your content, navigation and
your website's overall search-engine empathy from a
technical aspect. |
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Yes, I want my website tuned, what do you want me to do?
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Simple. Email and tell us exactly what it is you want to achieve from your website
and what you think is wrong with your site as it is
currently. We'll examine your existing website on-line and
give you a free estimate without obligation to determine how
best we can help, how long it will take for results to
become evident in search engine results and how much our
work will cost. |
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All websites produced
by AI&I have website optimisation built-in as standard
as part of the package because it's pointless publishing a
business website that isn't optimized and expecting it
to be competitive in today's virtual market-place
because in our
opinion, to do that would be negligent and a complete
waste of your money.
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AI&I |
| "they
live and breath website optimisation". |