Taking Your Business Into the Future

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Our philosophy on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that it's just simply good website design. But here is some really extensive reading if you would like to see for yourself.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization, check out these links:

• Chasing the Search Engines' Algorithms... Should You or Shouldn't You?
• Six Powerful Truths About SEO That You Don't Know
• The 5 Biggest Mistakes Almost All Web Designers Make
• Search Engine Optimization
• Google Information for Webmasters
• SEO According to Google's Webmaster Guidelines
• Keywords, Competition and Being Number One - Uncovering the Algorithm
• How We Really Use the Web, Chapter 2, by Steve Krug
• Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are constantly changing how they find and rank the websites they list. These days, by the time someone finally figures out the newest algorithm (ranking method), the search engine companies have already changed it again. The search engine companies have figured out what website designers are doing to "trick" the search engine into thinking their sites are more important, and many of the search engines will blacklist websites that utilize those tricks -- which means your website won't be listed at all no matter what you do.

Good website design will always be important to search engines, however. When we develop your website, the very last thing we do is make sure that page titles and descriptions are in place and that the keywords defined in the meta tags match the content on the page.

By using a simple text editor to create your pages from scratch, we eliminate many extraneous HTML markup that many WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver Internet Explorer and works well in Opera and Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox and Netscape, the three major browser engines in use in the United States. Our website statistics show that 99.5% of the viewers of websites we have developed are still using Internet Explorer. add into the code. Those programs are great for creating layouts that work in every single web browser in existence, but they add so much HTML markup that it's hard for search engines to actually find your content. Our practice is to make sure your website looks great with the most commonly used browsers.

Another thing that is important to search engines are the links you put on your page and the links that point to your website. The more websites that link to you, the more likely that a search engine will find your new website and spider it. You really have very little control over who links to you, but it certainly helps if you ask companies to add a link to your website on their website. The more related the content, the higher you will rank. The higher ranking the reciprocal link is on search engines, the high rank your website will be. The same is true for websites that you link to. Think of adding a Preferred Partners page to your site and adding links to companies that you mention in the body content of your other pages. Consider having advertising space on your home page for companies that are related to what you do: if you are a realtor, offer space to mortgage brokers and title companies, for example. Done correctly, advertising space offers another form of revenue for you!

One of the most important things to consider when creating your website is the actual content. We try to limit the use of large graphics on the websites we design. The use of style sheets and creative programming will usually accomplish what having thirty or fifty similar images can do. By using text rather than flashy images for your website navigation system, the webpage will load faster for your customers and you have more content for the search engines to look at and determine what your webpage is about. Make sure your pages actually say what your company offers. You may use an image to layout a lot of text or use a specific non-standard font, but search engines will only see an image and they'll never "read" your text if it's not actually text in the body content of the page. A good philosophy to live by is that "Form Follows Function."

The most important thing to remember when creating a website, however, is that there is no guaranteeanyone can offer to have your website listed at the top of search engines within the first six months after your website is made live to the world. We can guarantee that we will submit your website in three days, but even the major search engines say on their websites that there is no guarantee they will spider (look at) your site before the next two months have passed. No company besides the search engine companies themselves have the ability to determine when the search engines will index your site. All you can do is ask them to look at it. Then you wait. For example, Google states on their URL submission page, "We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear."

The only way to guarantee that your website will be listed at the top of a search engine is to consider pay-per-click and other similar programs offered by search engine companies. Even then, there are still disadvantages. Depending on your industry and the keywords you have selected, the price per click to your website can range from $0.03 to as much as $5.00. In other words, you could pay as much as $5.00 for every time someone visits your website from the sponsored advertising you have on a search engine. The good news is that most pay-per-click programs offer a limited budget service. You can set a limit of $50.00 per month, for example, and once you have had that number of clicks, your website won't be listed in the sponsored advertising section on the first page anymore (which means no more charged click-throughs).

There are companies that will charge thousands of dollars to optimize your website. Even if you choose not to work with JDR Solutions for your website needs, please make sure to do your research and read the fine print before you throw away money on something nobody can really guarantee.

Search Engine Optimization is just good website design. It's that simple.

For more information about our website services, please give us a call at 1-765-623-0098 or send an email to info@jdrweb.com.