Fri June 18, 2010
Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) Just Got better
For several years now we have included a standard level of SEO in the development of all of our websites so that our client's websites perform well for searches and so that if our clientele desire an aggressive approach to search engine marketing, they have a good platform to begin with and don't have to redevelop their website to achieve their marketing goals. In this level of search engine optimization, we ensure that the HTML page code is valid and has been optimized. We also ensure that the navigation can be read easily by search engines and use meta tags, robots files, and search engine sitemaps to make it easy for search engines to access our websites and acquire information about the content inside. Upon the launch of a website, we send invitations to the top search engine providers to review and index the site. Then we use Google Analytics to review the website's performance. Usually it takes approximately 6 to 8 weeks for a brand new website at a new domain name to come up in search engine results. Recently, this seems to have changed for the better.
At the end of May we launched a website for The British Columbia Society of Transition Houses (www.bcsth.ca). To our surprise, within the first week after it launched we had received a visit to the site via a Google search (a search relating to the website's content). The site has been up for about three weeks now and has had many visits from Google Searches as well as several Yahoo searches.
Why: Search engine practices are closely guarded so we can only suppose that the speed with which our site became available in Google's search engine index is due to search engines in general increasing the frequency of their updates. It could be that with the increasing reliance people have on social media, Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, Flicker, Vimeo and the many other “Web 2.0” websites that search engines have been forced to provide almost realtime updates in order to keep current. Regardless of the how or why of it, the net result is that new websites, if built with search engine optimization in mind will be accessible via search a lot faster than in the past and that's some news we're happy to report.