Autus Web Design & Marketing

Technology House, University of Salford, Manchester M6 6AP. Tel: 0161 278 2534

Search Engine Optimisation

A search for ‘search engine optimisation’ on Google will show you thousands of websites offering to use a range of techniques to apply SEO to your website.

However as a website owner (current or potential), it is unlikely you will ever use these techniques yourself. Here we will give you a brief explanation of the prime tools and techniques which should be used to optimise your website. We will also focus on explaining the logic behind these techniques. We hope that by giving you an insight into the logic of how Google works, we will help you to understand why certain search engine optimisation techniques are effective – and others dangerous……

In this section we will concentrate on Google – the most widely used and sophisticated search engine.

Once your website is established on Google it will cache your website roughly every 4 – 6 weeks. This means it will visit it to gather information on the website to re-assess where it should place your site.

Domain name

Google takes account of your domain name when listing your site. This is best explained by way of a simple case study.

We developed a website for Winstanley Mortgage Services. This is far too long a name for a URL (website address). So we asked the client:-
What is your business? Answer – Mortgages
Where do you do your business? Answer – Wigan.

So we bought and applied the name www.mortgageswigan.co.uk

We optimised the site primarily for the keywords ‘mortgages’ and ‘Wigan’ and for the Google search phrase ‘mortgages wigan’ the site is usually number one – please check today’s position via the link below.

> Link to the Google search…..

Conclusion – Google takes account of the content of your URL and will recognise keywords in it. So consider this when selecting your domain name.

We have developed several search engine optimisation techniques utilising this knowledge for our clients’ benefit. Please see Topic Pages below.

Page Tag

This is located at the top left side of your screen. It is an open invitation for us to state to Google the prime keywords of the website. You can use around 60 – 80 characters to provide this information and we have found that listing the keywords in descending order of importance is effective.

Each page on your website has a page tag. Thought should be given to the content of the page text, as the Page Tag is most effective if the Tag reflects the most popular keywords used on that page. As an example, please see the Page Tag used on this page of our Autus website. You will see that it reflects the text on this page. Compare this with the PageTag and body text on the home page of our site. The home page is optimised for ‘web design Salford’.

> Please see the Google result on this link ....

Whereas this SEO page is optimised for ‘SEO Salford’

> Please see the Google result on this link ….

It is our experience that over 70% of the websites we analyses fail to maximise the potential of this very simple yet critically important tool.

Please note, in achieving the positioning of the Autus site in the above searches, we have done much more than Page Tag optimisation. However in terms of the benefit to effort ratio, optimising the Page Tags on your website is probably the most important single SEO activity.

H1 Tag

You may recognise this as the strap line or slogan. It is the first heading on each of your web pages. Google places high importance on the first major heading on a page – the logic being that Google expects it to contain some prime keywords. So, your webmaster should help Google by loading some prime keywords into the H1 Tag, whilst keeping it meaningful and attractive for the human visitor.

It is also considered helpful to Google to have another version of the H1 tag at the bottom of the page to reinforce your keyword message.

Section Headings

As we move down the page to the body text, we break up the text of each web page into sections, each with headings. This enables the visitor to scan or browse the text rather that scrutinise it. This lends itself to the frequent use of headings. Logically again, Google expects to find keywords in the headings, so we should oblige.

Google also interprets bold text and to a lesser degree italics, as an indication of keyword content in a phrase or sentence. Thus we sectionalise our pages for the human reader’s convenience, and use bold headings to further highlight the keywords.

We will sometimes use italics in the body text and especially in bullet point lists of products.

Keyword Density

Google will attempt to identify the keywords on your website, and using the techniques described above will greatly assist this, which should reap benefits in positioning.

The Google robot will then scrutinise the general body text of each page to see how frequently the keywords are used, in proportion to other words – and calculate the keyword density. It expects to see a keyword density in the region of 5 – 12%. More than this and it starts to suspect the webmaster of spamming, and reacts negatively. No need for us to detail the consequences - just don’t do it.

Topic Pages

From analysis of the above detail, we have distilled several techniques for optimising client sites for specific reasons.

If a client offers 3 services - air conditioning, refrigeration and ventilation.
We will develop a page specific to each service and optimised for that service.

In the case of a service which is offered in a specific geographic location, we will include the location as a keyword.

Thus we will have an Air Conditioning page.

The page tag will focus on Air Conditioning and Manchester.

The H1 tag will be something like Air Conditioning Contractors Manchester.

essential seo - inbound links We will have section headings like:-
Air Conditioning Installation
Air Conditioning Maintenance
Air Conditioning Case Studies

We will reinforce a version of the H1 tag at the foot of the page.

We will include the Manchester address on every page.

We will buy a domain name which includes the keywords Air Conditioning Manchester and point it at the optimised page. Thus in effect, we will create a mini site within the total website for each service.