search engines

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Interact's back to basics web design approach is by its very nature conducive to effective marketing. Simple and clear sites, relevant and up to date material, fast downloads, usability and accessibility will all contribute to the effectiveness of a site.

what about search engines?

Search engines are extremely important and can be responsible for a significant proportion of the visitors to your site. You should review how your competitors perform on the main search engines to see if there are any lessons you can learn. What are the important search terms or keywords that your clients or customers will use? Which competitors are ranked highly for these keywords?

how can I improve my search engine rankings?

Achieving a high ranking on search engines is based on a combination of:

content
links
keywords

There is no end of advice from search engine optimisation (SEO) experts about loading your pages with keywords and swapping links in an effort to boost your search engine ranking. These efforts can be effective but search engines are continually striving to produce relevant search results by ensuring that genuinely interesting sites are rewarded with a good ranking. This same process will penalise sites that have artificially boosted their keywords and their links.

There is no substitute for honestly presenting the most useful and interesting material about your company or organisation. Search engines will find you. And other sites will want to link to your site if it is really interesting and helpful. Interact believes the key is to present your own content as effectively as you can. If you can overlay this with careful attention to keywords and a link strategy, that is probably the best approach. Any attempt to artificially improve your ranking by over-use of keywords or dubious linking strategies is dangerous - the search engines don't like to think they are being tricked!

how do I get listed on search engines?

We will submit the sites we design to major search engines when the sites go live. It can then take some time before search engines visit and index your site. In the meantime, continue to promote your site and get as many other sites as possible to link back to your site. Over time, your visibility on the search engines should improve providing you continue to work on keeping the content fresh and adding new backlinks.

don't forget other sources of visitors

Whilst some sites will rely almost exclusively on search engines, don't forget that you can attract visitors to your site in many other ways. Conventional marketing techniques including advertising (online and offline), PR, mailshots (conventional and email), events etc can all be effective. Word of mouth is still extremely powerful and, for some sectors, can be the main driver of traffic to your site. It is important to consider carefully how your web site fits with your other marketing communications to ensure you achieve your objectives. Think of your web site as an online brochure and think how you can get as many of your target market to view your site. Simply creating the site is not enough - you must attract visitors to it.

implications for web design

It is important to discuss search engine strategy with us before we begin to design your web site. Think in particular what role you want your web site to play in your overall marketing activities. Think how visitors will find your site and assess the importance of the search engines in driving traffic to your site. We can then consider what combination of content, links and keywords can attract traffic to your site.

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