Is your company website easy to find?

If someone was searching for details of your company online, could they find your website quickly and easily? 

Are you sure that your company website is being recognised by search engines as often as you would like?

Brett Porter of Strike Designs, one of Spiral’s approved suppliers, has outlined for us seven simple steps that will ensure the best search engine position for your website, with minimal outlay of time and cost.

Step 1 - Search for your company name in an Internet search engine. If your Internet site does not appear at the very top of the results or, at worst, somewhere on the first page you should really be questioning why.

Step 2 - Run a page of your site through the W3C's HTML Validation Service (http://validator.w3.org).  A few errors are quite common and shouldn't be a major cause for alarm.  However, a large number of errors can have a negative impact on your search engine placement, cause display and functionality problems across different browsers and could be an indication that your site is in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Step 3 - If your home page uses Macromedia Flash that contains links into your site, it can be acting as a barrier to a search engine which could be having a severe negative impact on your search engine placement.  If you are unsure whether Macromedia Flash has been used you can simply right click on the area.  If you are over a Flash movie the menu will include a link to “About Adobe Flash Player” normally at the bottom.

Step 4 - Ensure your content is all displayed in 'real' pages.  Pages that include a question mark in the filename (e.g. index.asp?id=5) will, more often then not, be excluded from search engines listings and thus not maximising your search engine potential.

Step 5 - Ensure the filename, the title (the text that appears on the top-left of the browser window, above the File menu) and the heading within the page are all similar and representative of the content.   For example, if the page is for your latest product, the Acme Spade 5000, the filename should be along the lines of acme_spade_5000.asp and both title and heading should be Acme Spade 5000.  Doing this will help to have a direct positive impact on your search engine position.

Step 6 - Write supplementary articles based around your business or area of expertise and publish them on your site.  For example, if you sell ride-on lawnmowers consider writing an article entitled ‘Important considerations when buying a ride-on lawnmower’.  Well written articles will not only provide your visitor with important information to assist them in making the right decision and establish you as an industry expert, but will also provide good keyword enabled content for a search engine.  To add a real boost to your online presence and search engine position, contact a relevant third party site and ask them to publish your article with a link back to your site.

Step 7 - Be very wary of emails that say they will submit your site to 75,000 search engines and directories. These are scams that might not only take your money but also result in your site being banned from some search engines.  If in doubt, look at their website and their clients and then do a search for both in a search engine.

Brett Porter is a director of Strike Designs Ltd and has been building commercial websites since 1999.  He has a BSc in Information Systems Development, an MSc in E-commerce and owns and runs a small portfolio of Internet businesses.

Strike Designs are an approved Spiral supplier.  If you would like more information about the services they offer, then contact us at Spiral.