HCOMS Blog

Below is a summary of SEO, these are a set of guidelines that we at HCOMS follow and have had great success with. Using these practices we have taken over websites from clients that have not been showing up in Google, even in their niche. Within 3 months we had managed to get them on the first to third pages of Google over a variety of key search terms.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, is the practice of optimising a website so that it appears higher in a search engine results. This can be done in many ways, some more beneficial than others, but there is no real definitive answer to how to get to the top of say Google (I will use Google as my main example as it is the most widely used search engine.), the engineers at Google change the way their spiders* process results all the time, and buying your way to the top is not on the agenda for most small or even medium sized businesses.

So how do you get your site up there in the results?

The cold hard truth is that there is no specific answer, different sites require different strategies. For example, a site about football isn’t going to appear in the top pages of Google without an extensive, costly marketing campaign, simply because of the amount of sites dedicated to it that are out there. However, a site about football transfer rumours is much more likely to get higher up in the results with far less SEO, because it is a niche and a niche site is much easier to exploit than a broad one.

The code itself

Make sure your code is well formed and that your content is succinct. Avoid using tables, and keep CSS and JavaScript in external files. You want the spiders to see your content, not what’s making it look pretty. Make use of header tags to show off what content you have on your site. Check your spelling, you don’t want to be getting penalised for simple mistakes. Validate it, valid XHTML code will become more and more important over the next few years as search engines start penalising more heavily for bad code.

Meta tags

A simple piece of SEO is to add Meta tags to your pages, although it is entirely possible to appear high in search engines without any Meta tags and many so called SEO professionals will tell you that they are obsolete, this is not entirely true. Search engines are looking for what you have in your page, how do you think Google adds a description to its results? The use of meta tags will allow search engine spiders to easily index what they find, add descriptions to the results, and define what keywords are relevant to content and such. For the simple task of adding them in, it is hard to say that they are truly obsolete. In short Meta tags are not the be all and end all, they do not have a huge effect on your ranking, but they definitely make your page come up a lot neater in search engine result pages.

Keywords and key word density.

These two factors can play an important roll to whether your site appears in Google, doesn’t, or gets banned entirely! Keywords MUST be relevant to your content, you WILL be penalised if you “spam” your keywords, honesty is the best policy, don’t put keywords in if the don’t appear in your content!
Flooding your site with key words will have an adverse effect on your results, spiders will take one look and just report it back as spam, and there is the possibility that you will get blacklisted from Google for a few months, which will do wonders for your SEO…

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Ever notice that column on the right of search results? This is where PPC sites are placed, by using PPC this guarantees that you will appear in this column. Although it is not guaranteed that you will appear there every time, especially when searching for broader sites. PPC is best used in the early stages of setting up a site, especially say an e-commerce site, it can be costly (you pay every time someone clicks on the link), but it does generate traffic to your site, this is undeniable, once people are aware of your site and word gets around, then generally it becomes a little obsolete, especially when you’re appearing on the first page along with your PPC result!

Linking

You may have often received emails from people or companies saying they can get you 10,000 links in 30 days, that you’ll be king of Google, and then the world! Alas no, these are known as link farms and will get you blacklisted from Google almost instantly, needless to say, avoid these like the plague.
Genuine links however will do your site no end of good, especially when linking to sites that have similar content, or directories that can list you in the correct way. If you can get your site on DMOZ** then you’re well away. Linking to sites that have irrelevant content can also have a detrimental effect on your sites ranking.

So Google knows what’s on your site, we’ve got a good set of keywords that are relevant to our site, and we’re paying for a bit of PPC to get us noticed, what now, sit back and wait for the hits to roll in?

NO!

Update your site regularly! If search engines see little or no change to your site, you can soon drop down the listings, so keep adding fresh new content as regularly as possible. There is nothing less interesting than looking at a site that has content still on the home page from years ago, for spiders and humans.

We use the “site report” tool on goodsitebadsite.com, which can inform you on the number of links that are going to your site.

Finally, go organic!

Once your site has been set up for a while, and you’re getting regular hits, you may stumble across what is possibly one of the best forms of SEO, organic SEO.
Let your site grow; let all the ground work that we put into coding your site well do its job. Watch as more and more people discover your site, keep adding in the relevant content and adding links to similar and relevant sites, and you’ll soon find your site a haven for your niche at the top spot. Best of all, by this point, it might not cost you anything to be there…

*not real spiders, these spiders are what search engines use to collect data from your site, so that they can compile relevant results based on what they find.
**DMOZ is the single largest directory for sites in the world, all major search engines link into DMOZ and use its database to help get return results from searches.

Welcome to the HCOMS blog, We hope this will be of use to everyone who has an interest in website.