Search Engine Optimisation or SEO brings Beyoncé to Exeter? Yep if you’ve been following so far, “Beyoncé to help in light household duties” now seems to rank in the top three of a Googlé search.

Update – “Beyoncé Exeter” now position 2
Update – Now position 1

Further to this I am eagerly expecting people to fulfil my desires for a Leica M9 and a Colnago Mexico due to similarly high rankings for search strings.

So what’s this all about?

It started as a bit of a joke, I noticed that cigar smoking football players seemed to rank highly as search strings for The Design Credo WordPress blog (this is not a group that I have previously had an interest in). So checking it out, this was in fact true (by accident) as explained in my earlier post.

What Will Improve My Google Ranking?

Firstly it is absolutely essential to understand that whilst people may be very moved my visuals and aesthetic design, search engines, as yet, are not. They trawl or ‘crawl’ through the html code that is the basis of web pages and sites looking for relevant text. Some of this text is hidden, unless you view the source code of a page, but most of this is there to be seen by the viewer.

So, what will improve my search engine ranking?

Page Title

Depending on what browser you are using you will see a title at the top of the page. Currently this has a useful effect in search engine position and should employ value laden keywords and strings.

Page Heading

HTML is a structured system used to describe web-pages, there is a hierarchy to it. As such it is assumed that the main page heading, or ‘h1′tag, holds particular information summarising the text below. Not surprisingly Google places great importance on this first h1 tag. Every page should have one at the top of the body text.

Body Text

Again it is fairly intuitive that the text based content of a page will hold relevant keywords that the reader is expecting to see following the search. This isn’t rocket science. Google in particular applies greater weight to the text towards the top of the page.

SEO – The Bits You Don’t See

At Design Credo we try to structure our sites so that the important ‘value laden’ text appears towards the top of the code. As such SEO is embedded in our code design. We also ensure that pages have suitable ‘meta tags’ including appropriate keywords and descriptions and that these are different throughout the site.

Flash not flash

Flash, whilst offering a very rich experience rates poorly for SEO as well as accessibility, as such we tend not to recommend it. Nowadays there are many alternative methods to add interactivity to sites whilst keeping them fast and accessible.

SEO – The bottom line

There is little point in having a website if people (or only the wrong people) find it. Words make the difference, words in the appropriate place, selections of keywords and appropriate groupings of keywords. For the record I am not expecting Beyoncé to pop round, this is just a silly example to make a point, someone may need their Aston looking after though (joke).

Next time I will look at how to generate suitable keywords for your Organic Search Engine Optimisation whether in Topsham, Exeter or the UK.

We are the people who try.

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