Web Design Cork: how to improve your search engine positioning…

Taking the month of August as an example, search engines were responsible for 47.06% of the traffic to this site. The single search query that brought the most traffic was ‘web design Cork’.

The traffic to this site is small, but focussed, and it’s no accident that the term ‘web design Cork’ leads people to this site.

At the time of writing, if you search google for ‘web design Cork’ you will see this site about position 3 or 4 in google.com and google.ie as well as searches for sites in Ireland. My aim would be to get to position one, which would bring even more traffic, and if you look back over this blog you will see the site has been climbing and climbing so that number one spot is not beyond reach.

Before I go into how I approached getting these results so far, I should explain that for those planning something similar, the first step is to choose your search term carefully.

Choosing your Search Term

I chose ‘web design Cork’ because it was highly relevant to my business, not overly competitive, and was a term that is searched for.

For example ‘web design Ireland’ would also have been relevant, but it would not have been quite as targetted and it would be a much more competitive term, making it harder to dominate.

‘Website design Ireland’ was also an option, but my research showed that ‘web design’ in general is a much more searched for term than ‘website design’.

It was a little harder to research whether it was a term that was searched for, because Cork is such a small market the data simply wasn’t there, however I was able to ascertain that people often searched for ‘web design [placename]‘, which was enough for me.

In order to research what people search for and how competitive the term might be you can use tools such as Web CEO (which has a free version) or there are online tools such as Wordze and Wordtracker. Google Trends is also useful for broad research.

So, once I settled on the phrase I wanted to target most, what did I do to get from nowhere to page one on Google?

Web Standard Design

I designed the site to web standards ensuring that the content of the page is as easy for the search engines to spider as possible.

Relevant Content & Page Titles

I ensured my content was focussed on ‘web design Cork’. The homepage of the site has ‘Web Design, Cork’ as a heading (a H1 header in html) and in the content. I also created another page called ‘web design Cork’, which is an overview of the site and who I am but includes the term ‘web design Cork’ several times throughout the content, without hammering it in so much it no longer reads well.

Regular Relevant Content

So my site was set up and included content on ‘web design Cork’, but search engines really love fresh content, so having a blog is a relatively easy way to ensure you can have regular relevant content. Yes, I know my content isn’t as regular as it should be! :)

If you look over my blog you will see I posted updates on my Search Engine optimisation progress with the term ‘web design Cork’ which I hope were of interest to people, but which also ensured I was growing more content that included the term in page titles, file names and content.

Internal Links

There are several links throughout my site which use the anchor text ‘web design Cork’ including a link from every page back to the homepage – this tells Google that I consider ‘web design Cork’ to be a relevant phrase for my site. This is not as valuable as other people letting Google know that, but it can help!

External Links

This is the singlemost important part. it’s important to get the other stuff right, but if you don’t get this bit right, you will flounder. At the moment links from other sites to your sites are massivley important when it comes to doing well in search engines.

The absolute ideal in my case would be to get links from other sites and blogs which use the anchor text ‘web design Cork’, but any inbound link will help if you have put the effort in elsewhere to ensure Google deems your site relevant for the term are targetting.

Directories
To kick off the process of getting links from other sites to my site I signed up with some directories. I think this is of limited value to be honest, but it gets the process underway. I feel that links from directories are probably not worth a whole heap, but if you sign up with a good few it at least brings your link count up from zero which is bound to count at least just a little. See my post on directories for a list of the directories I got my site linked to from.

One other advantage to directories is that with some of them you can control the anchor text used to link to you. See my post on the importance of anchor text to get an idea of the value of this.

So what else did I do to get more links?

Social Media & Twitter
I say Social Media, because there are many social sites that could potentially be useful, but the site I find most useful is Twitter.

It’s an indirect kind of boost in a way, but I signed up with Twitter in order to get a window into the Irish tech industry and as I got to know people on Twitter they got to know me.

In general Twitter can help raise your profile and generate leads, but in terms of SEO, it is my belief that when people make the connection between your Twitter profile and your site/blog they are more likely to link to you. I don’t conciously try to ’self promote’ on Twitter, but from time to time it just happens organically and I have found people linking to me due to conversations I was involved in on Twitter. I’m frankiep on Twitter by the way :)

Useful Content
Writing content that people will find useful is a good way to try to build links. It’s not always easy, but sometimes we forget that things that are second nature to us may be useful to others. For example I wrote a blog post on how to improve SEO and user experience on Wordpress blogs. I wrote the post based on the things I most commonly do on blogs I am setting up. It immediately got a couple of links.

My post on ‘What Width Should Your Website Be?‘ is another post I hoped people would find useful, and while it hasn’t got any links, it does get quite a lot of traffic. The impact of traffic on search engine positioning is debatable, but let’s put it this way, it certainly can’t hurt!

What I Don’t Do

I don’t post personal or non web design related stuff on my blog. My decision to only post work related items means that all the traffic coming into the site is somewhat more targetted. Apart from ‘web design Cork’ the other top search terms leading people here are:

• 2008 best width for a website
• website design cork
• website width
• design cork
• designcork
• what width should a website be
• cork design
• cork web design
• frank prendergast cork

It is my view that posting non relevant stuff would dilute Google’s view of the sites relevance to ‘web design’ and as such potentially affect my ranking for ‘web design cork’. Because these terms are all broadly related to web design, it all goes to improving my ranking for ‘web design Cork’.

But it takes so long!

Don’t expect an overnight success. This site has been live about 8 months, but having said that I have not been as attentive to it as I should! Certainly you need to be thinking in terms of months rather than days or weeks, but this site is proof that a concerted effort, even with sporadic updates can return results.

Good Luck!

I hope this post is of some use to anyone who wants to improve their site’s search engine performance. If you’re Cork based, feel free to contact me if you would like to hire me, or even just for a coffee and a chat if I’m not having a hectic week!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.