Search Engine Optimisation - What Is It?

When building and maintaining websites, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about making sites ‘friendly’ to the search engines and helping the sites achieve high rankings in the search results for important keywords relevant to the topic of the website. It is also a service which we, at Magic Web Solutions, can offer separately or as part of a full-scale web development project. For more information about the service, please visit http://www.spiderfriendly.co.uk/.
 

So, how do we approach the work on sites we are given to optimise? In a case where SEO is part of the web development plan, we monitor the development process and give developers advice on how to build a search engine friendly site. There is a set of web design rules, with which a site should comply for the best SEO effect. 
 

In a case where we are asked to work on an existing website, we start with an SEO review, which again includes important design considerations. We analyse the website for common design mistakes, which will have to be fixed to ensure maximised outcome. Later, we will consult the client's web designer on how to fix those issues or do it ourselves.
 

We always estimate the possible outcome of an SEO campaign and inform our clients about possible problems. If, for example, the site has elements of unethical SEO on it and its current rankings indicate that a possible penalty has already been applied to the site, we tell the client why we think there is a penalty working, what the possible reasons might be and how we would propose to lift it.
 

Another important aspect of SEO is choosing the right keywords to target. If the site is optimised for keywords that nobody ever searches for, these efforts will bring no traffic. If the chosen keywords are not relevant to the main topic of the site, search engines will send irrelevant traffic to it. And if the site is focused around relevant, but too competitive keywords, it may never achieve rankings high enough to turn into traffic. To pick the best keywords, we use WordTracker - a comprehensive keyword research service respected by all professional SEOs.
 

After the keywords are chosen and agreed upon, we start working on the pages. Sometimes it's possible to just edit the existing text to saturate it with enough keywords to achieve the best rankings. In other cases, we might need to re-write webcopy from scratch and create new pages based on that copy. In this case we will take care of incorporating this page into the site and optimising the navigation links. 
 

We also arrange submissions of the website to free and paid directories: we offer standard and customised submission packages. We also consult the client on other possible long-term linking strategies that will help the website develop a solid, beneficial and ethical web presence without any risk of penalisation. We warn the site owners against any kind of unsafe link-building strategies.
 

Later, when all the main SEO work is done, we continue to monitor sites using various statistics packages and advising clients on how to proceed with their websites, if such monitoring is included in the contract. We realise that the most important outcome of an SEO campaign is not rankings, but conversions and ROI.

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