Search Engine Optimisation

To ensure that this website is accessible to all and easily found at the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) we had search engine optimisation specialists Search Engine Serious (SES) consult for us and advise any changes that needed to be made to ensure search engine compliance.

SES advised that the following points needed appraising:

* Quality of html code and site architecture
* Accessibility for search engine robots
* Submission to relevant directories

The first stage of the search engine optimisation process, checking the code and site architecture was a simple exercise to complete as the code was near perfect with the exception of some missing alt tags. These alternate descriptions are not a problem as regards the quality of the code and do not affect the overall look or integrity of the site or have any impact on the search engine marketing.

The second stage of the search engine optimisation process was initiated with a check of the site in Xenu Link Sleuth. This software follows all links on a site and reports any broken links and also produces a valid site map. Again, the site was near perfect with only one broken link showing - easily fixed in a minute. Another aspect of Xenu that impacts the search engine optimisation process is the similarity between Xenu's spidering of the site and a search engine's spider. If Xenu doesn't find all the pages, the search engine robot isn't going to index it. So a simple check of the number of pages found by Xenu compared to an actual list of all the pages quickly establishes if all is OK.

Finally, a vital part of the features that search engines consider important is the quality and number of sites that link to any given web page. In fact the main constituent of Google's methodology is called PageRank - this is a score based on the number of inbound links that page and is detailed here on the Google site. Google considers a link to a page as a vote for that page - thus a page with lots of inbound links has lots of votes. So to help gain inbound links to the site, SES visited many of the better directories on the web and sought out relevant categories. This exercise has two positive effects on a page, the first is that people browsing the directory can follow a direct link to this site, secondly the directory page acts as an inbound link, boosting the populaity of the page in the search engine results pages.

For further information on search engine optimisation, visit Search Engine Serious or call 01246 557711