From £50 per month we will dramatically increase the traffic to your website!
Find out more > What we do | How to increase traffic | Keep it visible | Links | Search engines | Maintenance
What’s it all about?
Having the best looking website won't give your business any benefit if it can't be found. Each page must be content rich, search engine friendly and should be easily found by potential customers using relevant search terms. Search engine optimisation of your web pages can achieve this.
Registering your domain with all the major search engines alone won't give your pages search engine visibility unless the pages are built for search engine optimisation.
Popular animations based on products like JavaScript or Flash, for example, are to all intents and purposes invisible to search engine crawlers and can seriously affect the search engine optimisation process. So can Active Server Pages, Java Server pages, elements contained within frames, and pages which enforce acceptance of cookies.
What aSplash does
Every web page is built to maximise it’s visibility to the search engines and focus on a particular search term. You wouldn’t design and print a beautiful brochure and then leave it hiding in the cupboard, no matter how attractive and simple to navigate your website is, the search engines only looks at the code. [Right click on any web page and select view source to see what the search engine sees.] A website designed and developed by aSplash benefits from extensive thought and research into the relevant search terms and meta-tags for the product or service the site is promoting. The site is then constructed around those embedded search terms and meta-tags.
In terms of overall page content, website page titles are the most important search engine optimisation element of all. They are weighted heavily in all search engine algorithms. The titles are what will be listed on the search engine result pages and are what you see in the blue band across your browser window. Even more importantly, they are what a searcher will use to decide if they want to visit your website. This title then should be attractive, informative and use your key search terms, and the same terms should be within the page content.
Using the key search terms that we would like the site to
be found under we optimise the web page. By using the Analog system provided
by our main Hosting Provider and Google Analytics we monitor the success
of our websites.
By using style sheets, ‘buttons’ are text rather than images so that the links within the website are relevant to the content of the website, and visible to the search engines.
All images have ‘alt’ tags which again focus on search terms.
Websites are labeled [where appropriate] in the metatags with Internet Content Rating Association® to ensure that sites are not blocked from computers set up to restrict access to unsafe sites.
Sites are registered manually with major search engines which still accept unpaid registration, and automatically with minor search engines. Because the search engines regularly change their criteria for ranking websites, aSplash constantly monitor changes with Google analytics and can advise on new methods of optimisation.
What you can do to increase your web traffic
When your site is being built, identify the search phrases
you would like to focus on, ask yourself what you think your customers would
be typing into the search engine, make a note of queries about your site
content in phone calls, ask friends what they would type in, and identify
one phrase for every page of your website.
Please note: It is very easy to get your website visible on very particular search terms or company names, eg. Search for aSplash and you will invariably see the company website in first position. However, searching for eg. Web design Wales is a much likelier search term so coming top, or even on the first page of Google is a much bigger challenge. If you would like to test for your self we are on the first page of google for that particular search term and thats out of 10 million listings!.
Keep it live and visible!
If you regularly walk along the same row of shops, you will know that it is only when the shop window changes that you really notice it again. The search engines are the same, each time they look through your site, they notice whether or not there have been changes, more changes mean greater visibility.
Consider adding a separate newsletter page or a latest news
section to your front page. aSplash can create a password protected section
to add to your website which will enable you to do this as easily as you
send an e-mail.
Interact with your site visitors, suggest they register their e-mail to be
kept up to date on news, special offers, or relevant events. Use your newsletter
as an opportunity to contact your customer list and include links back to
your website. E-mail collection needs to include a Privacy Policy on your
site to re-assure that you are not selling the e-mail on to a third party.
Reciprocal Links
One criteria for search engine ranking is the number of links from good quality [in this respect visible to the search engines] websites. The more sites link to you with relevant search term text, the more visible your website will be to the search engines. Irrelevant linking can damage your ranking. Many sites will be happy to exchange links with you, eg. If you are a tourist attraction, contact local holiday accommodation owners and ask for reciprocal links. aSplash can add a links page to your website, or modify existing links pages, we can also request links on your behalf and ensure that the site linking to you has the correct code to maximise the search terms.
Paying the Search Engines
There are three ways the search engines and directories can charge you to be displayed in their search results.
Pay For Inclusion
This guarantees that your web site will either be listed in the search engine index or if a directory that an Editor will review your application
within a specified time period.
Pay For Placement
This guarantees that a link to your web site will be prominently displayed in a particular category of a directory, or that a link to your web site will be prominently displayed on a search engine results
page if a specific search term has been used
Pay For Placement / Pay Per Click
This guarantees that your web site will achieve a specific rank when someone types in a keyword phrase based on how much you bid
for that keyword phrase and rank.
Currently Popular Pay Per Click Options
- Overture.com
Hands down, this is the industry leader. You can expect to spend £50.00 to set up your initial account, and you'll have to bid a minimum of 1p per click above your competitors. Also, you have to spend a minimum of £30.00 per month here. But if you are looking for targeted traffic and "Top 3" ranking with some major search engines, this is the way to go.
- Google Adwords
You can set your own budget, but the more popular the search term, the higher the cost. - Ah-Ha.com
Want to get featured listings on Excite and WebCrawler? Well, if so you'll have to go here ah-ha is the PPC provider for these search engines, and other deals are expected.
Optional Maintenance Agreement 2010
aSplash can provide regular site maintenance at £50 per month (£60 per month for e-commerce sites) payable in advance by standing order for minimum periods of 12 months.
This service allows the site owner to have minor changes such as text and prices modified on the site each month and covers up to four hours work. In the unlikely event that problems may arise with the site between maintenance days, the necessary work will be carried out at the earliest possible time, and the number of hours required deducted from the following months maintenance [or invoiced if for more than four hours work – see below]
In the event of no changes being required to your site content or when those changes take less than four hours the following maintenance will be carried out for the remaining time aimed at increasing your sites profile with the search engines and keeping the content fresh:
The analog system and/or Google Analytics statistics of your site will be
analysed
sufficient changes to pages and/or metatags will be made to enable re-submission, usually aimed at promoting particular keywords.
potential reciprocal links will be sought out and implemented once approved by the site owner
competitors on the internet will be analysed and modifications made to keep
the site competitive
web directories will be sought out and links to your site added to them
Not covered in a maintenance agreement
New web pages, sites or products
Site makeovers.
Work requiring more than four hours will be charged at the additional rate of £15.00 per hour and invoiced on completion, for payment within 28 days
How your maintenance works
Payment is made in advance on the first week of the month preferably by standing order to asplash.com
Maintenance on all sites with agreements is carried out in the third week of the month unless otherwise agreed
Urgent work will be carried out at the earliest possible time
All required changes to the site should be sent by e-mail in the second week of the month for that months work.
A word on free and low cost web hosting
If you host your web site on a free server it's important
to note that you may have problems. You can get web sites hosted on free
servers listed with the search engines, but search engines do give a preference
to web sites that have their own domain name.
Also, when you host on a free web server you will be sharing one IP address with hundreds of other web sites. Since some engines monitor IP Addresses, that means that if just one of those other web sites spams the engines and gets penalised, it is possible that the penalty could be accessed against the entire IP Address and not just that one web site.
And lastly, if you are on a very busy paid server - you may also have problems. In order not to overburden any particular server, most search engine spiders limit their access to each server. If your pages are hosted on a server with thousands of other pages, the spider may never get the time to reach (and index) you.
aSplash host most of the websites we build with www.scl.co.uk because we have found them to be reliable and can be easily contacted. They take responsibility for your website and keep regular backups.
- Inexpensive Logo Pens with Company Logo.
- Letterhead Printing
- plastic brochure holders
