Search Engine Marketing & Analytics
Web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. The most common fallacy in development companies is that meta-tags are primarily used by Search Engines to rank sites. This was the case many years ago, but meta-tags are not as relevant in the rankings today.
Our approach is to put together a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign that is managed actively throughout the year. This would be an ongoing effort which would include 6 steps:
- Baseline Search Engine Rakings
- Setup analytics tool of choice
- On-Site Optimization
- Competitive Analysis
- Keyword Research
- Monthly performance reports and site modification recommendations based on those reports
When we are build a new site, many of these items are completed during the development of that site such as:
- Add a robots.txt file: this prevents search engine “bots” from indexing content you don’t want indexed, such as 404 pages, directories of files or images, login pages, etc.
- Create an XML sitemap: generate a cross-search engine listing of the pages on your site that you want the search engines to be aware of, how important they are and how often they change.
- Train content editors on how to manage title, Meta keywords, Meta descriptions and alt tags on each page.
- Add a custom 404 and 500 page: write a friendly “page not found” that helps users find the content they were looking for. Direct them to pages you’d like them to see.
- All JavaScript will be moved to bottom of page or we will use external JS cache files.
- Evaluate old links, 301-redirects.
- Make sure the site has no broken links and is web standards compliant.
Other items, such as Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis and monthly performance reporting are then addressed under a separate SEM contract.
