Making certain a company website appears in search engines requires painstaking optimization. Strategy must be planned on the basis of the key words used by customers, to which are then added, following a market study and analysis of competitors, the phrases most commonly used in search engines.The technique used to increase hits acts on the HTML code, the language of the World Wide Web used to write all websites, as well as site texts (search engine copywriting), distributing key words in a harmonious manner and relevant to the context.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which affects all elements of a site (page layout, graphics, content, technology and interaction), aims to increase the number of pages indexed by the main search engines used by targeted users (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN and portals that use the technology and database), and improve visibility for key words that are important to the customer’s business. To pursue these objectives, the so-called spiders (software agents that explore the web in search of new content for the search engines) must correctly index the greatest number of pages from a given website. But how?
The website’s navigation structure (organization of links and content) must enable the spiders to reach the majority of the site’s content in a simple and linear manner, especially if this content is intended to be visible to the public.
Links must be as simple as possible, i.e. in text form or as linked images. Text must be given a prominent position in the page’s HTML source, so as not to "bury" it under hundreds of lines of code (text prominence is one of the evaluation parameters for a website’s relevance in the eyes of search engines) or nesting them in tables and sub-tables.
This is where CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) come in handy, especially if contained in files external to a page, providing a language that associates information related to style - e.g. fonts, colors, line gaps – to web documents, separating page content from its presentation.
At the start of every project, TWT provides an as-is analysis of the website’s positioning in relation to key words selected together with the customer, identifying websites prominently positioned with the same key words, then every quarter checking growth together with the customer, both in terms of ranking and hits on the site.
This allows us to evaluate the project’s progress together with the customer and to look into possible stratagems to improve the site’s positioning, in an effort to increase the amount of qualified traffic generated by search engines.