Web Development Guidlines
Documents
HOME 
DOCUMENTS
DOCUMENTSWeb design is still a new field and a new business service. There are as yet, no clearly identifiable web development firms. No one has yet become a household term with regards too the rcorporate service or producten titiles
(Starbucks,Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Nike, or McDonalds to give a few extreme examples).Indeed, there are a host of large and relatively well known companies that provide these services, but to the public in general, they remain unknown.
Search Engine Optimization
This is a post-development service that helps your website rank on the major search engines. If for example, your business offers dog training services, you would hope that whenever someone searches on Google for “dog training” that our site pops up as one of the top listed sites. This is by no means a guarantee , and it is by no means an easy feat.
There are billions of websites online, and although the number of business websites is likely a small percentage of these, they compete head to head with every single other website regardless of its purpose. How is this so? Website search engines find and rank websites according to many parameters both known ad unknown (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others do not like to let all of the ir trade secrets go!). However, at the basic level, the search engines look for the following things:
Textual content: websites are coded with text…lines and lines of text-based co de. Search engines send out little software applications called “spiders” or “bots” that look for words and attempt to match them to the search phrases that users choose when they hunt for things online. When a match occurs, the website containing the word is listed in Google…somewhere! Perhaps 100 pages down…and this is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins. The goal i s to predict the words people might use to search for particular information, and t o set the code of a website to “offer” that information when the spiders com e searching. How is this done?
There are four levels of SEO. Site Development, Initial, Ongoing, and Paid Serv ices Site Development: At this most basic level, the very construction of a website will determine how well or how poorly a site will rank in the search engines. This level of SEO relies on a developer’s und erstanding of proper HTML coding and international coding standards. It also depends on what kind of technology is used when a site is coded. If, for instance, a site is coded entirely in Flash, it will never optimize…no matter how well intentioned the developer. If it is coded in HTML, then the developer’s code must follow particular principles and guidelines in order to set the stage for the following two levels of SEO. Even with HTML coding, if a developer codes a sight without regard to the requirements of the SEO to co me, the site can never be optimized to the extent it could be.
Initial SEO: This level of SEO begins once the development of the site is complete. At this stage, the client and project manager will meet again to discuss at length the commercial intentions of the site and the kinds of people and needs that the website is intended to meet. The purpose of this discussion will be to generate a list of words and phrases—20 to 100—that will be incorporated into Title Tags , Metatags, Top Level Content, Alt Tags, and other parts of the HTML coding of the site.
Further to this, the initial SEO will also generate a list of as many potential cross link opportunities that might exist. There are many free directories online where the URL and a brief description of the site can be included. These “cross-links” will allow people to discover your site from multiple places. They will also indicate to the Search Engines the “growing” popularity of your site…and therefore rank it more highly.
There are many issues to consider with SEO, and the IAM Project Manager will counsel you on most all of the areas of concern. At the end of this meeting, the plan will be formalized into a contract, and the IAM development team will implement the modifications. Once this step is complete, your site will begin to rank better on the search engines within the following 4-12 weeks. Once the initial optimization of a website is complete, the website will continue rank well, and it’s ranking will rise and fall according to a pattern that cannot be predicted. The website will retain a satisfactory ranking across time, and no further work really has to be done.
What does good raking mean? Well, don’t expect that your website will rank in the top 5, 10, or even o n the top page. If the Site Development and Initial Optimization are done well, the site should consistently rank within the top 1 to 5 pages. To improve this becomes more challenging, and unfortunately more costly.
Ongoing SEO: This level of Search Engine Optimization is a very important part of SEO, and one that requires constant maintenance and updating of the sites code. This task entails constantly researching the business and the terms that will maintain good SEO. This is an optional service that requires approximately 5 to ten hours per month (or per a schedule that is agreed upon by the owner of the website).
With ongoing SEO, a site’s ranking can be guaranteed to fall within the first 3 pages of a search engine consistently…and there is a 75% or greater chance that it will fall within the top 20 listings according to the searchable terms used. The question is, how can a website be guaranteed to fall within the top 5 or 10 listings? This is where things become very costly and fall outside of the control of developers.
Paid Services: Remember that there are billions of sites online, and all commercial sites vie for ranking whether they intend to or not—strictly based on the textual content that the search engine spiders find within their code. There are some funny things that happen with optimization. Your site may be for a car sales company. You might sell leather “bras” to protect the front ends of those cars. When a woman searches for braziers, your site comes up 5th on her list of lingerie shops. Why? Well, once again, remember that search engines are text based and look for words within your site to compare to a person’s search terms. The fact that you rank so highly for the term bra “brazier” means nothing to you…but it is a real problem for the small lingerie shop around the corner who never ranks on any of their terms. Why does this happen? There are too many variables to understand completely, but there are some premium services that Google and Yahoo offer that help to guarantee very high placement.
One of these services is called “pay-per-click.” What this means is that a company like yours will enter into an agreement with Google or Yaho o. You select a word or words that you think are dead ringers for your business and that you have worked into your coding in order to rank highly. Google or Yahoo will give you a premium placement link on the left hand side of their search engin e window (you can look now to see others there) where you will be positioned on many occasions when someone searches for the words you chose. The catch is this: whenever someone clicks on that link, they go to your site, you rank more highly again, but you also pay for each of those clicks…sometimes in cents, and sometimes in dollars, depending on the popularity of the word (basically, how competitive is your industry and how many companies would like to rank highly using the same term?). Both Google and Yahoo have rates sheets that show you the popularity and costs of individual words…and that information is as interesting as it is occasionally shocking. There are other pay per use services and expensive software packages av ailable to help with SEO, but really, the bottom line is this: Do you need it?
That’s really up to you to decide…and, of course, how much you would like to spend!
There are billions of websites online, and although the number of business websites is likely a small percentage of these, they compete head to head with every single other website regardless of its purpose. How is this so? Website search engines find and rank websites according to many parameters both known ad unknown (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others do not like to let all of the ir trade secrets go!). However, at the basic level, the search engines look for the following things:
Textual content: websites are coded with text…lines and lines of text-based co de. Search engines send out little software applications called “spiders” or “bots” that look for words and attempt to match them to the search phrases that users choose when they hunt for things online. When a match occurs, the website containing the word is listed in Google…somewhere! Perhaps 100 pages down…and this is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins. The goal i s to predict the words people might use to search for particular information, and t o set the code of a website to “offer” that information when the spiders com e searching. How is this done?
There are four levels of SEO. Site Development, Initial, Ongoing, and Paid Serv ices Site Development: At this most basic level, the very construction of a website will determine how well or how poorly a site will rank in the search engines. This level of SEO relies on a developer’s und erstanding of proper HTML coding and international coding standards. It also depends on what kind of technology is used when a site is coded. If, for instance, a site is coded entirely in Flash, it will never optimize…no matter how well intentioned the developer. If it is coded in HTML, then the developer’s code must follow particular principles and guidelines in order to set the stage for the following two levels of SEO. Even with HTML coding, if a developer codes a sight without regard to the requirements of the SEO to co me, the site can never be optimized to the extent it could be.
Initial SEO: This level of SEO begins once the development of the site is complete. At this stage, the client and project manager will meet again to discuss at length the commercial intentions of the site and the kinds of people and needs that the website is intended to meet. The purpose of this discussion will be to generate a list of words and phrases—20 to 100—that will be incorporated into Title Tags , Metatags, Top Level Content, Alt Tags, and other parts of the HTML coding of the site.
Further to this, the initial SEO will also generate a list of as many potential cross link opportunities that might exist. There are many free directories online where the URL and a brief description of the site can be included. These “cross-links” will allow people to discover your site from multiple places. They will also indicate to the Search Engines the “growing” popularity of your site…and therefore rank it more highly.
There are many issues to consider with SEO, and the IAM Project Manager will counsel you on most all of the areas of concern. At the end of this meeting, the plan will be formalized into a contract, and the IAM development team will implement the modifications. Once this step is complete, your site will begin to rank better on the search engines within the following 4-12 weeks. Once the initial optimization of a website is complete, the website will continue rank well, and it’s ranking will rise and fall according to a pattern that cannot be predicted. The website will retain a satisfactory ranking across time, and no further work really has to be done.
What does good raking mean? Well, don’t expect that your website will rank in the top 5, 10, or even o n the top page. If the Site Development and Initial Optimization are done well, the site should consistently rank within the top 1 to 5 pages. To improve this becomes more challenging, and unfortunately more costly.
Ongoing SEO: This level of Search Engine Optimization is a very important part of SEO, and one that requires constant maintenance and updating of the sites code. This task entails constantly researching the business and the terms that will maintain good SEO. This is an optional service that requires approximately 5 to ten hours per month (or per a schedule that is agreed upon by the owner of the website).
With ongoing SEO, a site’s ranking can be guaranteed to fall within the first 3 pages of a search engine consistently…and there is a 75% or greater chance that it will fall within the top 20 listings according to the searchable terms used. The question is, how can a website be guaranteed to fall within the top 5 or 10 listings? This is where things become very costly and fall outside of the control of developers.
Paid Services: Remember that there are billions of sites online, and all commercial sites vie for ranking whether they intend to or not—strictly based on the textual content that the search engine spiders find within their code. There are some funny things that happen with optimization. Your site may be for a car sales company. You might sell leather “bras” to protect the front ends of those cars. When a woman searches for braziers, your site comes up 5th on her list of lingerie shops. Why? Well, once again, remember that search engines are text based and look for words within your site to compare to a person’s search terms. The fact that you rank so highly for the term bra “brazier” means nothing to you…but it is a real problem for the small lingerie shop around the corner who never ranks on any of their terms. Why does this happen? There are too many variables to understand completely, but there are some premium services that Google and Yahoo offer that help to guarantee very high placement.
One of these services is called “pay-per-click.” What this means is that a company like yours will enter into an agreement with Google or Yaho o. You select a word or words that you think are dead ringers for your business and that you have worked into your coding in order to rank highly. Google or Yahoo will give you a premium placement link on the left hand side of their search engin e window (you can look now to see others there) where you will be positioned on many occasions when someone searches for the words you chose. The catch is this: whenever someone clicks on that link, they go to your site, you rank more highly again, but you also pay for each of those clicks…sometimes in cents, and sometimes in dollars, depending on the popularity of the word (basically, how competitive is your industry and how many companies would like to rank highly using the same term?). Both Google and Yahoo have rates sheets that show you the popularity and costs of individual words…and that information is as interesting as it is occasionally shocking. There are other pay per use services and expensive software packages av ailable to help with SEO, but really, the bottom line is this: Do you need it?
That’s really up to you to decide…and, of course, how much you would like to spend!
IAM Webs Development Application
If you would like to begin a web development with IAM Webs, the first step would be to download our application and call us to book a free initial consultation.
