Clearnet Designs

The most frequently asked question we get is about search engines. As most of our customers have little to do with the web and search engines, it often takes a while for them to understand that high search engine rankings can never be guaranteed. 

The reality is that all search engines have spent years perfecting their keyword indexing algorithms in order to ensure that the most relevant pages are returned for in your search engine results (SER).  There are no "tricks" involved, in fact, trickery of any kind will quickly guarantee your website is removed and blacklisted.

The best and most consistent advice we give with regards to search engines is as follows:

1. Identify the search phrases that you wish your site to be found under (note I said "phrases" not "keywords"). This is a balancing act between identifying search phrases that are very common that provide too much competition ("Estate Agency" returns over 46 million results in Google) and identifying search phrases that are so obscure that no user would ever search for them. 

2. Design your site to load quickly, be "human-friendly", have lots of good quality content and the search engine optimisation will fall into place. Its our job to make each page friendly to the search engines by use of meta tags, but the page content itself has to reflect what the meta tags say. I often advise customers to specifically write articles or "white papers" in their specific field of expertise and publish this on their website, which will increase the "usefulness" of their site. Search engines will recognise this.

All our web sites are designed, first and foremost to please the human viewer, but with search engines strongly in mind.  All sites are submitted to the common search engines and free directories on a regular basis as part of the original price.

Results speak for themselves. Three of my sites that have been optimised for search engines have reached no.1 in Google and MSN rankings for their specific search phrases and the others have all reached the top 3 pages.