GemGfx recently made a bid to deliver a branding and website package for a prominent prestige school in Trinidad and Tobago. During the process we were asked to deliver some Search Engine Optimization. The following is an excerpt from a post concerning same. Hope it’s beneficial.

Good morning gentlemen,

The following is a detailed outline, as detailed as I can get, of what needs to be done for a basic search engine optimization of your current site. It is an expansion of what was said in an earlier email.

Search engine optimization can be done for the entire site, but it is only completely necessary for the first or index page. Some of the stuff you guys heard already, so forgive me if I sound redundant.

1. Meta Tags: Meta Tags are hidden code snippets that are placed on a page that tells Google what the site is about. The Meta Tags are placed in between the tags of the page and can have several titles but the two important ones are the Keywords and the Description. It is important to enter the appropriate and relevant keywords and also an appropriate description. If you need help coming up with the appropriate keywords or you would like to know what people are searching terms people use when searching you can use Google’s Keyword tool found here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can enter the keywords or key phrases each separated by a comma. You can also limit your keywords or phrases to about 12. This is because Google has begun a crackdown of sorts of people who Spam keywords. That’s those who have too many keywords on their index page. You should make sure also that the keywords that are in your head tags, also appear as content on your index page. It shows the relevance.

This is how the Meta Tags look for GemGfx.com.

Right now if you do a search for “design outsourcing Trinidad”, “graphic design outsourcing Trinidad”, “web design outsourcing Trinidad” GemGfx appears on the first page both in Google and Yahoo.

2. Content: Make the actual content on the first page relevant to the search. Google’s search bots not only search your meta tags, they also crawl your page for text. It the text is not relevant or does not match the keywords, it will reflect in the ranking.

3. Optimize Code: Optimize the html code of the index page. Google’s bots search for links and text on your index page. They are not interested in colors or formats. So it is the practice of many to separate their styles from their pages. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets come in here. All the “styles” that determine the look and feel of your site should be put in a separate file and linked to the index page. This way Google’s bots will crawl the page faster. A file can be created for the CSS and given a name for example: “style.css” then a link is placed within the head tags that links to the file. It would look something like this:

If there is any Javascript on the page it can also be placed in a separate file and linked to the page.

4. Submit URL: Add the URL to Google by submitting it.
Again if it hasn’t been done before, the URL of the website should be submitted to Google. Often because Google does the crawling they will come across your site eventually. Submitting the URL to Google speeds up the process. It’s just a matter of submitting the address of the site to Google using a form found here:

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

5. Sitemaps:
It is also a good practice to submit a site map to Google. This is different to just submitting the URL. Sitmaps are small text files that basically map out the layout of the site for Google. This brings into the picture a very handy arena set up by Google called Webmaster Tools.

To access Webmaster Tools, you need a gmail account. It can be found here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

With Google Webmaster Tools you can submit a sitemap that Google’s staff will download and check periodically. This will also assist the site’s ranking in Google.

First you generate a Sitemap. This is relatively easy because there are online resources that do it for you. The one I use is XML-Sitemaps found here:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

a. Just enter the URL of the FOBA and the site will crawl your site for you and generate a sitemap that you can download. Usually looks like “sitemap.xml”

b.Download it. Check it over make sure all is ok.

c. Upload it to the main directory of the website.

d. Go to Google webmaster tools and Add the site to the dashboard.

e. Submit the location of the sitemap to Google. by entering it’s location to the file. Should look something like “http://www.foba.fatima.edu.tt/sitemap.xml”. Google will periodically visit this file and use it to index your site.

6. Link Exchanges:
This one is from personal experience. It is widely believed that link exchanges help raise the ranking of your site. This is true to a point. The situation is that some unscrupulous individuals have begun selling links. Creating pages on the web with just links so that when Google’s bots do a crawl, many links to a particular site will come up. The links sites have no content other than links and have no relevance. In recent times, Google has begun cracking down on this and drop the ranking of sites involved in spam-like link exchanges.

This does not necessarily mean link exchanges are bad, but it just means you have to be careful who you link to and who links to you. It has to be a relevant link or else Google will frown upon it. So perhaps linking to educational type websites ect and they linking back to your site. This might be an option.

Till next time Ladies and Gentlemen,

Admin,
GemGfx.com

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