Search Engine Optimisation

Invent Partners build web sites which perform well in search engine rankings, and thus receive many more visitors.

We can also help to improve an existing site by cleaning up and optimisiong your website HTML code and page copy.

How we do it 

Content

The reason that anybody visits your site is to find information. They may be looking for information on prices, delivery times, or just your address. Your site needs to have this information. Content is king - the more information you can put online for viewing, the more visitors you'll get. Simple.

The main thing here is raw textual content - this is what the search engines read, and this is what we need to give them lots of. Many clients use a content management system to manage their own content, which allows them to grow the site regularly, and keep all the content current.

Keyword Density and Positioning

Keyword density, positioning and weighting are the most important factors in search engine optimisation. Search engines judge the relevance of any word in your site by how near the top of the page the word appears, and how many times it is repeated.

Optimizing HTML source code

Search Engines read through all of the HTML source code of a webpage to find keywords to enter into their database. This means that a search engine "sees" far more that the viewer does. This is both a blessing and a curse.

A common mistake that is made is to attempt to trick search engines into recording more keywords than your page is actually relevant to by using hidden text which is the same colour as the background of the page, or perhaps filling the source code with hidden "comment" tags, which are not displayed to a viewer.

Search engines are wise to these kind of activities. All of the major search engines have seen these kind of "spamming" activities before, and are now programmed to ignore HTML comments, and in some cases search engines may penalise your site for having hidden content that is intended to trick them.

The key is to steer clear of cheap tricks, and to simply use good design logic throughout the construction of your site.

Using Clean Code

The important thing to bear in mind is that as well as reading all of a webpages code from top to bottom, search engines also give a higher relevance weighting to keywords which appear nearer the top of the code.

The higher up your source code that your relevant content appears, the better your site will perform with search engines.

This means that good practice when coding HTML is essential. Complex table structures which force your textual content to the bottom of your HTML source code are an exceptionally bad idea. A good web developer should always manually check through the HTML source of a webpage after it is complete to clean out any unneccesary "bloated" code which increases the data size of the page, and pushes the search engine readable content further down towards the bottom of the source code.

Using <alt>, <summary>, <title> attributes and <meta> Tags

A number of other tools are incorporated into the HTML language which are designed to give information to things other than a standard visual web browser:

<alt>, <summary> and <title> attributes are designed to attach to graphical and layout elements within a page to provide a textual / auditory alternative to the visual content, for audio driven browsers, or web browsers which do not have graphics support. Search engines do read <alt> tags, although they all weight them differently. Although <alt> tags will not make or break your site, it is good practice to use them.

<meta> keyword and description tags are provided for the express purpose of providing search engines with information about the content of the web page they are about to read, and they appear at the very top of your HTML source code, between the <head> tags.

The <meta> keywords and description tags have been so abused by so many sites in the past, that very few search engines attach much significance to their contents, and some in fact ignore them altogether. However, here is an opportunity to mention your page keywords once again near the top of the HTML source code without being penalised.

“ Just wanted to send a quick 'thank you' to the Invent Partners team for all your help and support. I love the design of our new site and really appreciate the great service you provided at every stage - you turned a daunting project into one that I really enjoyed! Thanks again. ”
Lou, Advanced Writing Solutions

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