Place of design

Here at Place of design we only offer ethical honest transparent SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).  We have made the long term decision not to offer any of the underhand un-ethical so called “Black Hat” methods of optimising sites for search engines.  Our approach makes very good business sense for you in the long term

Ethical SEO or “White Hat” SEO
What’s the difference? Black Hat, White Hat, Ethical Un-ethical… Well, in the SEO industry there are a range of practices employed to promote websites.  Some are honest, while others just outright deceive users and search engines, filling cyberspace up with useless links and recycled spammy articles that no one wants to read

I’m splitting this up into 2 areas:
Problems with your practices, and problems with design

Problems with your practices

Doorway pages and sites
These are now viewed as blatant SPAM, which will get you banned pronto

Keywords

Keywords are good, but there importance diminished in about 2003, when the SEO companies abused them so much the search engines demoted their input in the search. Nowadays search engines take into account the text “AS SEEN BY THE END USER” to establish rankings. As I mentioned before – the title tag is very important, as end users see this, as is the description tag

Title tag

Example:

<TITLE CONTENT =”Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page”>

This is the page title, must be readable English, and appears in the browser tool bar, and as the website title. On search engines, using the above example “Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King – Home Page” is displayed as the “bit you click on” in some search engines. Goggle usually reads about 90 characters of this tag, so it is wise to set a character limit of 60, as the displayed part is often shorter. It is worth knowing that the search engines look at the content of this for relevancy (compared to the text on the page is on) and the content in terms of searching

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file is a file that tells search engine spiders what not
to index. Search engines “spider your website”, and follow instructions
left in this file

Scenario – you have a website, but you do not want the search engine to
list your customers directories (wedding images for example)

All about META tags
We hope these pages will demystify SEO, which is not a black art. META information just is a way of you telling the search engines what to do, and what not to do, enabling them to pass relevant content to the end user