Good natural SEO by default

I have just been speaking to a prospective client who sells insurance for nursery fees and childminding. They have had their website designed at quite considerable expense by a web development agency who have government bodies and the NHS amongst their clients.

Our prospect described them as “experienced” and a “professional outfit” and explained that their supplier designs websites for the NHS and other government bodies.

However, the website that this web design company has put together is completely lacking in even the basic page structure and information vital for Search Engines including meta data and header tags. For example the title tag for the home page of the site is simply “Home”. Another example is the home page of the ‘nursery’ section which is entitled ‘Nursery’.

Not only is this disregard for proper meta data inadequate from a SEO perspective but also presents a poor user experience. If a user has several web-pages minimised on their computer, and this particular site displays a generic title such as “Home”, little is done to remind the user what this particular site was about – this can only be negative and possible lead to a lost interest, enquiries and possibly sales.

While it would be fair to expect a web development company specialising in public sector web design to include relevant and informative meta-data for every page of a website they develop, it is probably true that they are not considering the wider SEO benefits of good page structure since. Why? Because, natural SEO may well be a low priority for a public health campaign website in favour of paid (PPC) and offline advertising.

When we undertake website design for insurance clients or companies operating in any other sector we deliver natural SEO friendly web-pages by default. It is true that things like meta-data are changed because marketing messages and target audiences are refined but the basics have to be present on the site from day one, not just for SEO but for your users as well.

The launch is just the start

We have just launched www.british.co.uk which we built using a CMS to enable our clients to easily publish news and features on a regular basis. Our client said “I have used a number of CMS’s throughout my career in journalism but the one you recommended and used is by far the simplest and most powerful I have come across”.

Areoff have put all the SEO and marketing infrasctructure in place while building the site and this includes:

• Semantic URL’s – web addresses that make sense to search engines and users
• Correct header tag structure – each page is structured effectively so search engines can easily detect the relevance of it’s content
• Inclusion of social media sharing tools
• Implementation of automatic site-map submissions to all major search engines

These are just a small number of things we have put in place to ensure that the websites we produce are naturally friendly and visible to search engines from the very outset.

But now the work really starts as our client obviously wants to promote their site on the internet to achieve a regular stream of visitors who will sign up to their news service as well as advertisers buying space on their pages.

So we held a training day with them to go through all the things they can do to improve the visibility of their content on the internet as they publish each news story and feature article. We don’t just instruct our clients to do certain things because “it’s good for SEO” but we explain why these things are beneficial to the visibility of their websites on search engines. All of these practices are simple to implement with the CMS we used to build our clients site. They include:

• Creating relevant and unique title, description and keyword tags for each post/article published
• Adding new categories for particular posts to increase relevance
• Sharing each post/article to social networking sites as they are published
• Add keyword links to other relevant stories on the site

There were many other strategies and practices discussed and the nature of these changes from client to client depending on their goals and needs. W get together with our clients on a regular basis to discuss other methods of increasing the quality of their website over and above simply publishing more and more content.

The cliche is ‘quality rather than quantity’. This is very true of content on the internet. It is increasingly important to publish, index, categorise, link and present content in a way that is relevant to users and therefore to search engines as well if you want your site to be visible and successful in Google and other search engines.