Search engine optimisation...

You're looking for something on the web. You type what you want into the search engine, press "go" and up come anywhere between a hundred and a million web pages, ranked in order of relevance. Thanks to the increasing intelligence of major search engines, you can usually find what you want in the first two pages of the results. And that's where every website is aiming to be.

Getting a high search engine ranking is, naturally, a massively competitive business - unsuprisingly, given the potential rewards in terms of traffic and enquiries. Search Engine Optimisation - aimed at addressing the numerous factors affecting how high your site is ranked for a specific search phrase is, understandably, big business.

The key lies firstly in researching the phrases your would-be customer might type in to try and find you and optimising your site to match these phrases. The more specific you can make these "key phrases", the less competition you are going to have and the higher up the list you are likely to find yourself. (see example right)

Getting a high search engine ranking depends on a wide number of factors. Apart from myriad tips and tricks, the basic strategy involves;

• ensuring good basic accessibility,
• providing relevant, informative copy
• getting relevant websites to link to yours
• identifying a specific market sector and targeting specific search phrases accordingly

Despite what some Search Engine Optimisation companies will tell you, it is unfortunately not an exact science. The search engines use complex algorhythms for determining ranking and these are ever-changing as web owners trying to trick (or "spam") the search engines in increasingly clever ways. Most web designers will confess to be occasionally dumbfounded by a site that ranks particularly well/dbadly for no reason.

The advice from Google? Build your site with lots of good content, concentrate on giving your visitors what they want and Google will assess it from there.

Good advice to a point - you should certainly never lose sight of making sure your site is informative and offers the user what they came there for.

In reality though, that is often not enough.

Websites need to be carefully constructed with attention paid to a number of key factors. At Severn Design, we take into account, as a matter of course, these basic factors, to ensure that your site has a good basic level of optimisation. Sometimes this is good enough to achieve a high ranking in time, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes there is a case for carrying out more optimisation work to try to increase rankings.

We'll build your site carefully,with the key optimisation considerations in mind, to help you get the best ranking possible. (For more detail on they factors affecting search engine page rankings click here).

Once your site is optimised and submitted, we recommend it is re-submitted periodically, and certainly when there are any key changes made to the site. See website maintenance.