We’re on page one! Freshleaf SEO… again

So anyone who read this post will know that we’ve been working hard to get Freshleaf Media’s website onto page one of Google for our chosen search term corporate website design. Well, I'm pleased to report that as of two weeks ago, we made it! Not only that, but we’re firmly above the fold, in position 3 – and we’re comfortably occupying slots 2 and 3 for corporate web design too.

To recap the journey; we launched the new Freshleaf site in May 2008 on a brand new domain, and after being sandboxed for a time, we first listed for our search terms in late July. It then took us until late October to get where we wanted to be for one carefully chosen search term.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. There are other search engines, and other search terms. Not only that, but SEO can’t be done and left alone – Google’s next update could potentially see us tumble down the rankings unless we keep working at it. But it’s nice to know we can do it.

The things you do for good seach engine listings!

So the saga of the Freshleaf Media website continues. We launched the site on a new domain back in May, and although we were delighted with our new toy, Google was less than impressed, and promptly sandboxed it. That meant that although we could be found by searching for Freshleaf Media, or for specific content we knew to be on the site, we weren’t ranked at all for any of our carefully chosen keywords.

So right here, ladies and gentlemen, we have a case study in Search Engine Optimisation. Our chosen keyphrase was corporate website design, and the challenge was to get us out of the sandbox and onto page one!

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Search Engine Optimisation Terms Explained

If you’re looking into SEO for the first time, it can appear to be some kind of mystical hybrid of rocket science and magic. There are a number of buzzwords which are often liberally thrown around: PageRank, backlinks, keyword density – but what do they all mean?

Search Term – The words which a person searching the web puts into the search engine. So if a user is looking for someone to redesign their company’s website they might cast their net wide and put in ‘website design’ or ‘web design’ or they might be slightly more speficic with ‘corporate web design’, or they might prefer to go local and type in ‘website design dorset’.

Keywords – The website equivalent of a search term. So if you think your customers are going to be searching for ‘corporate website design’ you would list ‘corporate website design’ as a keyword on your website. You’d need to think about all the search terms which people might put in if they were looking for your specific products or service, so you’d also list various permutations, like ‘corporate web design’ ‘corporate site design’ ‘professional website design’ etc. You might even include mis-spellings if you think that words will be frequently mis-spelled in the searches (“corporate webstie desing”?).

Page optimisation – This is the practice of ensuring that the page looks important to a search engine for your particular keywords. Meta-data, image titles, link text , urls …. and also vitally the copy itself (sometimes overlooked). Search engines rank some elements as being more important than others, so having your keywords in your content is better than just in your meta data, and having the keywords in the title of the page and the content is better still.

Does Google prefer hyphens or underscores?

Senior Google guy Matt Cutts has recently confirmed that it is still preferable to use a hyphen instead of an underscore when naming files or web pages. Google will read a URL such as www.freshleafmedia.co.uk/corporate_web_site_design.html and conclude that the page is about "corporate_web_site_design" not "corporate web site design". In the former example, corporate_web_site_design is treated as a single word (one that no one would ever for search for) whereas the latter example will give Google four separate key words to chew on plus a whole phrase "corporate", "web", "site", "design" and "corporate website design".

In the long term Google may be looking into interpreting the underscore character as a word separator but for now the advice is still definitely - don't use underscores!

Corporate website design experiment: how to use a blog to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Everybody knows that a better result in the search engines = more traffic = more sales, right? So here's an experiment to see just how easy (or difficult) it is to claw your way up the search results using the power of your blog. I've carefully written this post to include the key phrase "corporate website design" in several prominent places and you'll notice that in some places I've spelled the phrase corporate website design (three words) and in others corporate web site design (four words). This is because Google will differentiate between a search for "website" and "web site" and treat them as two different searches bringing up different sets of results.

Now, I have to be honest, I'm not sure how well this will work on a brand new blog with no one linking to it yet but I'll keep an eye on the results over the coming weeks and let you know what happens.

At the time of writing (May 2008) this blog did not appear anywhere in the top 50 results when searching Google for "corporate website design" or "corporate web site design". Take it away search engine spiders....