Something to think about...

If you are thinking about getting a website built or revamping an old one do your research.

There was an interesting article in The Age this morning regarding "Findability" - how you rank in search engines. The article was quite basic and although raising some valid points it would have been good to mention what I regard as the most important part of search engine optimisation - "the expert factor".

Search engines aren't stupid, if they were, spammers would dominate them. Search engines don't just read through your website, they assess how much of an expert you are in your field. What determines your level of "expertise" is the quality of your content, the quantity of your content and most importantly the quality of other sites who link to you on the subject. If for example you had a gardening website, and The Age newspaper linked to your site from an article regarding gardening, it would really boost your ranking in Google.

For example, don't expect to have a 5 page website with no inbound links (links from other sites) - rank very well, regardless of whether you are using Flash or straight HTML. That's before we get in the importance of keyword rich page titles and urls.

Using a blog/news system (like the one you are reading), you can easily add content to your site that helps your ranking, while giving your potential customers useful information - no coding, no software. Since starting our blog, we've added around 2-3 articles a week, that's now 75 pages of content.

Be realistic about your ranking goals - everyone wants to be number 1. Take us for example, rather than focus on being listed number one in "web design australia" - we concentrate on "online store development".

It takes patience and a bit of strategy - but you too can get on the first page of a Google search result.

Use our Google ranking checker, to see how your site ranks in the first 100 results returned for particular keywords.

Have a great weekend,
David

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