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

What is our approach to SEO?

• Content is King. Unique professional effective content is the starting place. We sometimes re-write your content, or suggest additional content. We appreciate that whatever the search engine sees, it is a human that will be buying from your company, not a search engine
• Your website needs the right appeal to the right market. We will make suggestions and alterations improve the appeal of your website to the market
• We measure everything, and make qualitative decisions. We research your business sector to understand what is actually being searched for. This means optimisation will not normally be for a single keyword, but a broad spectrum of keywords which are chosen to represent their profitability and market placement
• Your website usually consists of more than the front page; this is why we optimise every page independently
• On your site we will include the usage of good well thought out metadata
• If needed we will freshen up the html coding and scripts, cleaning out errors and problems
• We will ensure your site has an excellent logical structure which is both easy for a human and search engine to navigate
• If we write and use press releases and articles, they will be unique, and relevant to your company, positioned with relevancy
• We create a sitemap to enable search engines to effectively find all the pages on your site
• Your site will be carefully added by hand to search engines. This process will include verifying your site
• If we acquire back links for your website, we will not spam irrelevant directories; we will position them intelligently, with relevance to your company

Why do we take this approach?

It works! It worked 5 years ago, and it will work in 5 years time. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, to beat the dubious practices employed by un-ethical SEO companies. The constant things search engines have respected and listed sites well for is high quality unique content, and relevance in links

Long term, you do not want to be in a position of constantly playing catch-up, and recovering from failures when one of the bad techniques other SEO companies employ trips up your website. We believe the internet is for humans first, and search engines are a tool to help humans find things relevant to their searches

What is the alternative?
Examples of un-ethical SEO include:

Spamming, by commenting on blogs
Often the un-ethical SEO companies leave a multitude of comments on blogs, all over the place, with no relevance, with the hope it leaves a back link to the target site. They use automatic “Bots” and scripts to do this.  Often tens and thousands of blogs are targeted at once. Not only does this fill the internet up with dross that people just don’t want to read, it causes the blog owners lots of work keeping on top of the spam.

Cloaking redirects
In plain English this means setting up lots of little secondary websites with the sole purpose of gaining page rank, but then having the secondary websites automatically redirect users to the primary, which benefits from a gain in page rank

Keyword spamming and stuffing
This is a bad technique that involves re-using keywords to the point the text is senseless to a real visitor

Hidden text and links
Often hidden text is employed, which is not visible to human, but is visible to search engines, this text is used to add content and keywords to a page that really has different content or no content.  People may do this for example to to widen the pages geographic appeal.  I am a “website designer in Nottingham”, I could hide text saying “website designer in Newark” and “website designer in Retford” etc.  Deceiving Google into thinking that I actually am a website designer in Newark and Retford

Another practice that is totally disapproved by search engines is hidden links.  Essentially hiding content from the user, but not from the search engine

Link farms
Some SEO companies use automated link farms which they place (often without your permission) on your site. The link farms basically are computer generated pages of links, to all of the sites the company wants to promote, along with hundreds of others. The value of the page to a human is zero, and Google disapproves of the method

What to do?

We believe in a straightforward approach. Our approach may seem conservative, and lack the instantaneous impact of the more underhand methods. However, our approach is not myopic, it is focused on the long term benefit you’re your business. If the way we work appeals to you, then simply contact us, and we can get things moving

Ethical SEO sounds like what I want, what next?

Call us today on Nottingham 0115 845 8953 for a free consultation. We will assess your site, discuss your business, and put together a plan for you

How much will this cost

For a 10 page web site, our SEO fees start at just £350.00

As you would imagine, some sites will require a lot more work than others. This is why we offer a free no-obligation consultation

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