Web site optimization - Where art meets science!

Web site optimization involves a variety of techniques to help get better listings on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. The web sites that perform best in sales and visitor terms are those websites that are optimized better than their competitors and are displayed higher up the lists on Google or other search engines.

The search engines send out programable crawlers to find out all about your website and the information contained in it. They work out what type of content you have in the site and how likely it is to be relavent to relavent keywords or key phrases when someone uses them in a search. The exact formula the search engines use to do this are a closely guarded secret or everyone would be doing it to get to number one spot.

The search engines then give you a page rank as to how important they think those pages are to other websites on the web. Google uses a scale of one to ten. For a small business it can be hard to get past no rank at all (Null), to a zero rank or even a rank of one or two. Google themselves only get a rank of 9 with a ten pretty much out of reach. Generally a small or medium sized business with a page rank of 3 or above though is doing fairly OK on the web.

Some terms are harder to crack because they are so popular. "Website design" is a hard one to crack on a global basis for example but "selling from a website" has less searches per day but is likely to be easier to get better listings for. "Web site designer portsmouth" is of course much more specific and we are likely to figure easily in those sorts of results to pick up local business to us for example. The less popular terms are called "niche terms" but can still result in many enquries as there is generally less competition to get past to get to the higher page listings.

Generally if you are not on page one or two when someone searches you stand very little chance of someone clicking on your link as against someone else in the higher positions.

Page rank is but one measure of how relavent or important a page is for a variety of keywords. There are actually over 100 known factors which affect where your page will be displayed. All these factors interact with each other too in a fine balancing act of getting it right to get good listings and "over cooking it" when a search engine thinks you are trying to cheat the system and they will penalise you as a result.

We know what many of the factors are through being involved in the business and getting information on the grapevine and from our own trial and error testing of various factors known to influence page position. We avoid doing 100% so that we don't overstep the mark and loose all the good work put in optimizing a web site. It is a bit like snakes and ladders - quite hard to get to the top but very easy to get it wrong and quicly zoom back to the beggining! Many novices or DIY optimizers make this mistake and frequently find themselves with a ban for three months or longer.

Here at ITS Magic we licence databases of all the actual web searches made over the last few months and can find many good niche phrases to use in the early stages of your web site marketing. We don't guess what and how people are searching for information relavent to your website we actually know what they are searching for.

Incoming links from other important sites are important to your position too as are things like keyword density, keyword position, keywords in meta tags and even things like image and URL names. Knowing what and how far to go with all this information is partly a scientific approach and partly a creative one. It is no good optimizing a site for a search engine if when someone gets to your web page it reads like a computer screen gushing out repetitive words in their thousands.

Our unique blending of art and science at ITS Magic ensures you get the best of both worlds and the resultant enquiries and sales as a result too.