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How do search engines work?

A lot of people feel lost when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO for short). This is a pity, because search engines are designed to find things for us, not lose us. However there’s so much misinformation, talk of secret dark arts and now big money in SEO, that it’s easy to get confused.

So how can you make your website optimised for search engines? Well here’s a few pointers:

  • Use someone who knows what they’re doing to set up a nice, clear, robust site for you, and use lots of good, relevant content.
  • Use the words and phrases on your site that you think people will type into search engines.
  • Don’t worry about adding secret hidden keywords to your site. At best, it won’t really do anything; at worst, you’ll be penalised by the clever search engines.
  • Use lots of links on your site! Don’t be a dead-end website. Add plenty of links to other sites, and make sure they’re relevant, quality websites. But don’t just have a big list of links, that’s totally boring and the search engines won’t be happy with you.
  • Get lots of other websites link to your site. Make sure they’re quality sites (look for their pagerank as one indicator).
  • Update your sites as often as possible. This will make a big difference.
  • Try to build up your content rather than replacing it. Have a news page and keep your archives, develop an eNews system and keep back issues posted on your site.

IMPORTANT: remember that search engines are designed to work for humans! Humans are not designed to work for search engines. It’s a silly idea to construct your site simply for search engine bots. Of course you shouldn’t do anything dumb or off-putting for search engines, but make sure you design, write and construct your site primarily for HUMANS. Let the search engine bots follow along!

We have two main SEO packages at Greengraphics:

The one-off SEO pack

We will go through your specific needs (what search words and phrases are you targeting?), and structure your site to best fit these. We will add a bunch of links from other specially-made pages on some of our other websites.

Please note, as mentioned above, SEO works best when you keep your site lively with new content (and links etc), so even though this is a one-off package, we highly recommend you maintaining your site and keeping it fresh with new content from time-to-time. Those little google bots like to see fresh content each time they pop in for a visit, so leave them a bikkie or two to keep them happy.

Normal price: $550+gst

The monthly SEO pack

On the monthly SEO pack we’ll set you up with web stats and generate a monthly web stats report for you. We’ll work with you on an ongoing way to tweak your content, and adjust the incoming links to your sites from other pages we can make from you elsewhere on the web.

Normal price: $50+gst per month (normally charged every 3 months)

Please note if you want the best result, we recommend a one-off SEO pack followed by the monthly SEO pack.

If you want a one-time boost or an initial kick-off, a Google Adwords campaign can be highly useful. Talk to us about this.

Call us on 03 5472 5300.