Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO as it’s often called, is an important concept in web development. Since the turn of the millennium, for better or worse, search engines have ruled the web, and Google Search is at the top of the heap. Also popular are Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Live Search.

All three work on relevancy, and to measure this they use links and keywords. That means that for the most important three search engines, the same techniques can be used to great effect. Once these search engines know your site is out there, and they’re very good at doing that even without your developer’s help, improving the way your site indexes for one of them will most likely help you with the others.

What Sanctum IT Can Do

Some of the things we can help you with for improving the way your site works with search engines include:

1. Rewriting your content, or showing you how to do it yourself. Users on the web read very little — they scan text quickly looking for hints of what they want. Search engines work the same way. Learning to write for the web isn’t difficult. It mostly consists of learning a few new habits. You’ll probably improve your site’s usability into the bargain by having this done.
2. Cleaning up your design and code. Often search engine position can be improved by making a website more “text-friendly”, since text and not images is all the search engines can read.
3. Technical tweaks. Quality content and inbound links are the most important determinants of a site’s position in search rankings, but there are certain technical tweaks such as the use of metadata and element order in your website that can also improve things. We’ll do these too, and if you’re curious, we’ll even explain how they work.
4. Installing statistics tools. We’ll install a tool such as Google Analytics for you and show you how it works, to get an idea of how users are coming to your site and what they’re doing there. Google has quite a few other tools in the same vein that can help you.
5. Making a sitemap. A sitemap is a special list of all the pages on your website. It’s simply providing an index for Google and other search engines that might mean they find pages that they otherwise wouldn’t.

Easier Than You Think

With over 175,000,000 websites online, attracting the attention of the search engines is a science that in some cases can return a very high return on investment. It can also be a tremendous waste of money. So-called experts in the search engine optimisation field, people we hackers call black hats, often take advantage of a credulous and non-technical public, making unfeasible guarantees like attaining first-page positions for your small e-commerce startup on an international search for keywords like ‘clothes’, ‘computers’, or ‘web design’. Your competition comprises thousands of sites, including some of the biggest brand names out there. First rule: if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t.

However, some elementary steps including the ones we mention above mean you can get first-page results for certain well-targeted keywords quite easily. Try punching ‘sanctum it’ into a Google search sometime. We didn’t need a marketing campaign to get that result, and neither should you.