Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Almost everybody knows that a good placement with search engines
is an important factor for the success of a web site. It is free
(at least it can be free) and works often better than paid advertising.
Very few people understand more about it.
Until some years ago, when there were only a few sites on the internet
it was easy to be found but this is no longer the case: there are
now over 10.000.000.000 pages on the internet (actually nobody knows
exactly but this is a minimum number) and hundreds of millions of
web sites. So how can you get found?
If people here on Crete have any knowledge of search engine placement
they will almost always mention the need of keywords meta tags.
The truth is that the keyword meta tags are now totally ignored
by Google, Alta Vista, Fast, Teoma, Lycos and Yahoo which comprise
well over 90% of search engine use.
The strategies to get a good placement are now far far more complex
and if you do not use them, very few people will find your site.
No visitors = no internet business.
Below is a quick overview of what is needed for a good placement.
It is a little technical, also a little superficial, but it will
hopefully give you an idea of the complexity of the process.
First you need to define the keywords that apply to your business.
These must be keywords that a user will enter in a search and you
want your site to appear in the first page of those results. If
your business is unusual it should be quite easy. For example someone
looking for a shipping agent in Crete is likely to enter "shipping
agent Crete" and will get around 3000 results in Google (Google
is the absolute market leader for search engines so we use Google
results as a reference). As you can see it is fairly easy to get
a first page placing because there are not too many competing businesses
and we placed one of our clients in position 3 and 4 for this search.
Try again if you have a hotel and enter for example "hotel
crete". You will get around 130.000 results (which is about
13.000 pages of results) and getting a place at the top in this
very competitive category is a LOT more difficult. (Please note
that getting a good result by entering the name of your hotel is
not a good way to see how you are doing in search engine placements
because nobody will know your name when they are searching for a
hotel in Crete).
The way to get a good position is to use the appropriate keywords
in your Title tag, in your Description Tag (the <HEAD> of
your HTML page) and balance them with the same keywords in the <BODY>
of your page through text, appropriate use of Image ALT Tags as
well as use them in specific <h> tags, URL naming etc. The
"density" of the keywords as well as their placement (beginning
of tags, high up in the <BODY> part) and order will also play
an important role. Having a relevant domain name will also help
a lot. A further determining factor with Google will be your Page
Ranking which will be determined in part by the links from and to
your site. The type of server on which you host your site can also
play a factor (if you are serious about your web site don't even
think about hosting it on one of the many free servers such as Tripod
or Geocities).
Search Engine Optimisation (now known as SEO) is becoming an important
branch of the internet business in America and is an expensive (from
1000 US $ upwards) and very specialized work. We are not SEO specialists
but will still ensure that your site gets good placements by paying
attention to the points listed above and Search Engine Optimisation
is a major consideration when we create a new web site.
If you already have a site but find that it doesn't get good results
on search engine searches we can also optimise it.
Please bear in mind that we will never guarantee a top placement.
Also bear in mind that getting a free listing in search engines
can take from several weeks to several months (but if you are lucky
it can also occur within days, it all depends on when the database
of the search engine is updated). Once it appears in the Google
database it will take even longer for the site to achieve a more
or less stable ranking.
Search Engine Optimisation is an on-going process (with a lot of
trial and error because the algorithms used by search engines are
kept secret and do change from time to time). Once your site gets
included in the search engine database, you carry on the work on
optimisation, observe how the results change (and hopefully improve)
and keep making further adjustments.
Below are a few examples to show you that we can produce results
(but again we must stress that we cannot guarantee them).
The results were collected from Google
searches done in March 2003 and sites that we created appear as
links. These results may not be the same if you try the searches
yourself at a later date.
• Search for hotels crete returns 136.000 results with Hotels
of Crete on the web in position 1
• Search for hotel crete returns 134.000 results with
Vritomartis Hotel in position 3
• Search for crete hotel returns 134.000 results with Vritomartis
Hotel in position 5
• Search for crete holiday returns 83.000 results with west-crete.com
in position 1 west-crete.info
in position 9 (but still no good results on the plural form crete
holidays. We are working on it!)
• Search for crete returns 935.000 results with west-crete.com
in position 12
• Search for hania returns 42.000 results with west-crete.info
in position 21(we are working on improving this)
• Search for kastelli returns 20.000 results with west-crete.info
in position 9
• Search for platanias returns 8000 results with west-crete.info
in position 8
• Search for agia roumeli returns 4200 results with Artemis
Studios in position 1
• Search for paleohora returns returns 1600 results with west-crete.info
in position 5
• Search for sougia 14.00 returns results with The
village of Sougia in position 1
and 2 and west-crete.info
in position 10
• Search for georgioupolis returns 18000 results with west-crete.info
in position 5
• Search for kalives 15.000 returns results with west-crete.info
in position 5
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