A few weeks ago I wrote the first article in this series regarding improving your search engine position. At that time our website was ranking somewhere around page 9 for our key search term “web design Brisbane“. Since then we have had some significant improvements in our search engine position. Below is a summary of the action we have taken.
Content
There is nothing new in the concept that “content is king”. It is a mantra that we have been preaching to our clients for nearly 18 years. The major search engines have always testified that you should produce unique, high quality content that is relevant to your site’s subject matter. We have been fleshing out the areas of our website to ensure that wherever content can be added or extrapolated it is.
Social Media
While we have advocated the use of social media for our client base, its been something that we have not devoted the time to ourselves. There is no doubt that creating and maintaining social media accounts across the many platforms is time consuming. The benefit though can be significant. We have started our own social media strategy, finally making use of those accounts we created years ago.
Image Tags
Again, there are no secrets here. When images are displayed on a web page they can hold a number of attributes that are hidden form view by default. The title and alt description are the two main image tags that should be utilised when considering your search engine optimisation strategy. We have been addressing our image tags wherever possible to help not only screen readers for the visually impaired but also our search engine position.
Using the correct protocol (http or https) in links
As part of our revised website design and development we decided to take Google’s advice and run our entire website using the secure sockets layer protocol (SSL) even though we don’t offer online payments though our site at this time. All of our previous links back to our website were pointed to the non-ssl protocol. After we had installed the secure certificate and the site was running under SSL by default we set about updating all the links to our site to reflect the new protocol.
Removing incorrect or dead links from the index
One of the other significant processes we carried out was to assess our links in Google’s index. Due to the previous DNS error there were incorrect entires in the index that had no relevance to our website or the web design services we offer. We compiled a list of these incorrect links and applied to have them removed from the index.
Results
A few days after the above changes were made we saw a jump from page 9 to page 4. After adding some additional high quality content we saw another shift to the top of page 3 where our website currently resides. We have invested a significant amount of time and resources to regaining our search engine position in a highly competitive industry. Our goal of course is to hold a page 1 rank for our key search term and we will keep you updated as we continue to improve our search result position.
