Search Engines

Imagine there were no search engines.
How would your website look?
What would you include and what not?


It would focus of the reader's interest and be highly relevant to them. Modern search engines just read your text, not your tricks. Relevance to the reader is the key.

Due to the fluid nature and rapid change of the contents of web sites and search engines, the online market is constantly changing and evolving. Therefore, it cannot be reliably bought into. Ongoing vigilance to search engine strategies and methods can put your business directly in front of the most highly qualified potential customers.

Search engine optimisation is the art of making website content more user friendly and relevant to rank it higher. Top listing results are the equivalent of a prime retail location; a point of high footfall of target customers. Search engines benefit from a clear layout with proper links, not some fancy JavaScript or Flash.

Keywords Matter

Most search engines only read the text and the descriptive ALT tags of your images. They then store them in the index databases which their readers query on their searches. It is therefore most important that you use the right keywords in your text. They should focus on what the website is about, be highly relevant. If you put "Free Beer" on a website about accountancy to attract more readers, you may get a lower ranking as beer is considered to be irrelevant to the rest of the website.

Search Engines Get Bored

Whenever a site changes content the search engines come in and re-index it. If a site doesn't change for some time it will be considered less interesting or abandoned and get a much lower ranking than it could have.

The simple solution is to keep your site topical with frequent updates. Our log files indicate that after an update the page views often double. Although a fair part of this is due to renewed search engine interest, there are also new readers who have found the site through improved rankings in the search engines.

Domain Name Focus

If you have a lot of domains sharing the same content you may want to focus them all onto one domain. Google say in their user guide that they don't like too many domains pointing at one site. We've noticed that domains using the domain focus feature in our content management system get better search engine rankings and more page views.