Search Engine Optimization Cape Town

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of improving the amount of visitors to a web site from search engines by improving its rankings in search results. The higher in search rankings a website appears, the more likely it is to attract visitors, which generally translates into more business.

Search engine optimization involves structuring and populating a websites code and content with relevant content and keywords that people would typically search for on a keyword.

rze-original uses sound basic search engine optimization practices (on-site) in the websites that we design. When designing your website, we do the following:

Keyword research

Check Google to see which is the most popular and relevant keywords for your products/services. In this process, we also identify any possible niches that make your products/services unique, making it easier to find for that specific keyword.

Keyword rich domain name

Where possible it is benefitual to use keyword rich domain names. If you had a business offering credit cards, a domain name like www.credit-card.com would be better than www.joes-cards.com. This is not always possible though, some clients prefer the company name as the domain name.

Filenames of webpages

The filenames of webpages should reflect the keywords that they are optimised for.

Page titles of webpages

Page titles of webpages should include the keywords at the beginning of the page title.

Meta tags

There are 2 meta tags that we relect on here, the Description meta tag and the Keyword meta tag.
The description meta tag contains the text that appears in search results, and should be relevant and unique for each web page.

The keyword meta tag is largely ignored by search engines due to abuse, but it is still good practice to use it, and should only contain keywords that actually appear in the text on the webopage.

Heading tags

Heading 1 (H1) tags should include the keyword that the webpage is optimised for. There must only be one H1 tag per webpage. H2 tags also have some relevance in Search Engine Optimization (seo).

Image alt tags

Images should include relevant alt tags, as search engines can't read imaes, only text, the alt tag is a textual placeholder the image.

Keyword density

The keyword density of keywords within text is very important, it shows the relevance of the content to the keyword, a percentage of between 3% and 7% is acceptable. Take care not to have to high a percentage as this may be seen as keyword stuffing. A good rule is to have the content as structured as naturally as possible, as humans would normally write it.

Placement of keywords

It is good to have keywords mention in the text as close to the start as possible. Mention the keyword atleast once within the first 50 characters of the text.

Volume of content

The volume of content is very important. The more quality content a webpage has on a particular subject (keyword), the more relevant search engines will deem it to be, and this should also improve the page rank of the page. In SEO Content is KING.

New content and blogs

It is important to add new content (new, not replace) to your website. This is where a blog can play a vital role. Write a blog about your specific field, any new developments, trends, etc. This shows that your website is alive, making it relevant to today's ever changing world.

Code to content ratio

It is good to minimize the amount of html code on a webpage and have a good code to text (content) ratio. Less code, more text.

Href links & anchor text

All href links should be textual, and should also have a title attribute. Search engines look at the anchor text (link text) to see the relevance of incoming links, and as we know, they cannot read images, so having href links with images are less effective. Anchor text should include the keyword the target webage is about. I generally repeat any image href links with textual href links elsewhere on the webpage. Search engines also cannot understand javascript links, so some pages on the website may not be found if they are not linked with conventional href links.

Sitemaps

All websites should have sitemaps as this tells search engines spiders what pages are on the website. Sitemaps should also be submitted to google.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file on the website, telling search engines which pages to index in their database and which pages to ignore.

Conclusion

These are on-site Search Engine Optimization (seo) factors that rze-original includes in our web design process. This will provide you with a good foundation for your website. There are other very significant off-site factors that vital to a webpage's ranking in google. Quality inbound links, links from websites with a good google pagerank and similar content, is the most important factor you must concentrate on for your websites success.

Using Google Adwords is another effective way to attract visitors to a website. This uses Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising. You bid on the keywords that you think are relevant to your businesss, and when someone searches for those keywords, you appear under the sponsored links in google, placed according to your bid. Should someone click on your website, you pay the bid amount that you specified. See the Google website for more information on this subject.

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