Don't do this to your Mississauga Web Design!
Search engine optimization, it sounds like an odd kind of thing that wouldn’t take much more than maybe putting a couple keywords in your article titles and making sure your robots file is updated properly. However, as the general public is now learning, there is much more to it than that. There has been an explosion of interest about search engine optimization in Mississauga web design due to the recent revelations about JC Penney, and what their web design company was doing for them. Clearly what they did worked, and it made an impact on their bottom line. How much impact still seems to be under heavy debate, as numbers are being tossed around on both sides of the argument. JC Penney claims that around 8% of their sales come from the web, an insignificant portion. However, you’re talking about the web. People don’t just go to the web to buy things from a store, they go to comparison shop, check prices and see if their local store has stock. They go to look at dress designs and research their purchases. Even if JC Penney had absolutely no way for people to buy anything from their website, they would still be benefitting a great deal from sitting on top of search results, especially through Christmas. And of course that ignores the fact that 8% of sales for a majour nation-wide retailer is a significant amount of money, money that smaller retailers might have been able to grab a bit of, had the Google results not been manipulated so well. The fact that it was done ‘well’ might be under debate here, but it was done very effectively. So, why wasn’t it caught for so long?
Talking to the head of these kinds of things at Google, he said that he was very impressed with how well his team does, seeing as they deal with somewhere on the order of a billion searches a day. Yes, that is a lot, but they are a very profitable company and this was a very, very big manipulation of a good number of search results. Surely they don’t agree with these tactics? Well, yes and no. They say that there is a very definite line between good and bad, white and black hat, tactics. This was in the bad camp, but think of where the revenue for Google comes from. 98% of it is from ads. When a big retailer with a large advertising account is at the top of search results, that means more clicks and more impressions. Which means more advertising revenue. Now, I’m not saying that’s what the situation is, just that we need to be wary of what’s going on over at Google. So let’s talk a bit about the ways that you should optimize for search engines as a basic primer on search engine optimization in your web design.
First of all, the best time to be thinking about SEO is when you start building your website. You can do all kinds of on-site and off-site things after you’re done, but the best time to start thinking about it is when you’re first considering what you want your site to look like, and how you want it to operate. Search engines use things called spiders, and these spiders ‘crawl’ the internet, looking for new content and building a model of how the internet looks and connects to itself. As you can imagine, this is a pretty complex job, and these spiders are constantly working. So what you need to do, is design your website in such a way as to make it easy for the spiders to do their job, and make it so that they find what you want them to find, and to give it the importance that you want to give it. The first basic rule is that the higher up in your site, the more importance the spiders will give to it. So that starts at the very beginning, whatever your top level url is. For example, http://www.yoururl.com is your most important page. http://www.yoururl.com/company/aboutus/bobsmith/projects is far less important, and once you get 4 or 5 levels deep, the spiders place almost no value on those pages. The way to get more value to those pages is to link to them, either from one of your more important pages, or from another high-quality web site. What JC Penney did is exactly that, they got links to their less important pages from other sites. The other sites weren’t valued that highly, but there were thousands of them that each contributed a little bit of value. This pushed up all of those lower value pages into first place in search rankings. Great for the company, until they got caught. Now they will be spending a great deal of time trying to rank back up, and will be watched very, very carefully by a number of different parties. It really seems worth it if you don’t get caught, but in all likelihood you will. So don’t risk it! Get guys like Lifeline Design to help you out with your SEO, they’ll do it the right way and you can watch your site rise to the top!
