SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

As a website designer, one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “Why don’t I show up on Google??!!” There’s no easy answer, but there are lots of things we can do to bring your site up to the top of the list. Below, I’ll share everything I know about how to optimize your website for search engines.



What it a Search Engine?
A search engine is simply defined as "a program that searches documents (your website is a series of documents) for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found." A few common search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is defined as “the process of editing and organizing the content on a web page or throughout a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic, unpaid search listing and thus increasing the volume of targeted traffic from search engines.”

What Does Central Studio Design & Communications do to ensure that our clients’ websites are Search Engine Optimized?
We do a variety of things to try to get the search engines to “find” your website. When I say “try,” it’s because with search engines, there are no guarantees that your site will come up high on the list unless you pay the search engine company (usually the first three items that pop up are paid advertisers).

• We title all of the pages in your site with relevant keywords, including the name and location of your business.
• We add alternate text (text that comes up if the image can’t display) to each image on your site, and we add keywords to each image as well. "Keywords" are words or phrases that a customer might type into a search engine to find your business. Back in the day, web designers would hide irrelevant keywords all over websites to try to trick search engines – for example, a popular phrase like “Pamela Anderson” in black letters over a black background, hundreds of times. Search engines have grown more sophisticated, and tend to pass on sites that use this type of tactic.
• We put relevant keywords in the background of every page. We not only put the name and location of your business, but we research other terms that your customers might use to locate you on the Internet.
• We make sure that your content contains as many keywords as possible, without making it sound like a crazy person wrote it.
• Whenever possible, we use live text instead of pictures containing text. Live text is visible to search engines, but text embedded into images isn’t.
• We submit your site to the major search engines in hopes they will come visit (or “crawl”) it, see all they keywords and rich content, and add it to their listings.
• We share your site on across social media. Search engines love it when a website has lots of external links leading back to it, so we try to create as many as we can. Currently we’re using our own website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ... and coming soon we’ll be featuring clients on our blog.

What Can You do to help?
There are a few things that you can do to help your site get moved up in the search engine rankings.

• Post a link to your site anywhere you can. Create pages on all of the major social media sites and post a link to your website on each one.
• Have other websites link your site to theirs. For example, if you own a clothing store, see if the designers you carry have a “Where to Buy” feature on their own websites.
• List your website on all of your printed materials (ads, brochures, business cards, mailers, banners, signs, etc.) This will help drive traffic to your site, and search engines love a site that gets lots of traffic.
• Keep your website content fresh – update photos and text frequently. Stale content makes search engines (and customers) bored.
• Start a blog, and keep up with it! A blog is a great way to tell your customers about sales, new products or services, or just to share little personal stories. Blog posts can be tagged with keywords, and linked back to your website.
• Submit your site to a free service like EntireWeb.com. Because these services collect your email address and may use it for marketing purposes, we don’t submit your site to them, but we do encourage you to look into them.
• You can pay. Although no one wants to hear this, they best way to ensure that you come up at the top of a search is to pay the search engine to put you there.

Site Still Not Showing Up?
Even with all these techniques, it can still take several months for your site to show up in the search engine rankings. We’ve found that after about 6 months of going live, most of our sites come up on top or on the first page of a search engine listing when the company name and state or city is searched.
To sum it up, there is no guaranteed, quick (free) way to get your site to be listed first, but with a little effort, your site can be made search engine friendly and easy for your customers to find.