Search Engines Listings: Black Art or Science

We have just launched a new website for our web design agency http://www.limetreeonline.com/ obviously, it is important to us that this site achieves a good ranking on Search Engines. However, we are a new company and at the moment we have a relatively low Google Ranking. We also provide Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services ourselves and so it is very important to us to get well listed high on Search Engines as soon as possible. Over the last week, I have taken on the role of optimising our website. I do have a good knowledge of all the issues however I have not done any hands-on optimisation work for some time. Our site has a nice clean, simple easy to use design. As the site is completely new it initially had a Google Ranking of 0 along with all other new websites. I have now written a lot more content, which I hope the site visitors will find useful. The best way to get people to visit your site is to provide interesting content. As the CEO I would normally delegate the task of SEO, however, I felt that to increase my understanding of it I would work on it myself. What I have realised this week is just how time consuming SEO is. It has taken up a very large amount of time to fully optimise the simple 10 page website that we have for our company. The main reason for this is the sheer amount of data entry necessary. For every page, it is necessary to conduct analysis of The Meta Tags (5 or so different ones), The Title Tags, Links, H1 and H2 tags. In order to do this properly, each one of these needs very careful consideration. Following the rules and placing something in each of these areas of the page is the easy bit. The hard bit is deciding exactly what to write. This is a task which should really be carried out by a creative writer or copywriter rather than a programmer. The difficulty is that at the moment there are very few such people that would have the correct technical skills to be able to correctly optimise the page. Very slight changes in the wording of these pages can make a huge impact on how many people visit your site and also how much you have to pay per click for advertising. In order to get it right some experimentation is necessary. For example including the words free, cheap, etc might drive a huge amount of traffic to your site, but is it the sort of traffic you want? In our case, this could lead to our sales guys having significantly more useless sales leads. It is also necessary to try to keep the content interesting whilst at the same time mentioning as many keywords as possible. This in itself is an interesting exercise. The good news is that as I write our site has been given a Google Ranking of 2 and all 7 main pages are now listed. This was achieved through following the guidelines to the letter on the Google Webmaster site and also due to the amount of sites that have now started to link back to us.

What I have realised is that in the future I will always be careful in making sure that our clients get the best mix of SEO skills, because I now fully realise what is required. SEO is not a black art, it is a creative science. It requires careful attention to detail, some technical knowledge and also very good copywriting skills. There is also large amount of information needed on each page even for a simple website like ours.