Our Own SEO Plan (Search Engine Optimisation)

Search engine optimisation is not rocket science or a mysterious dark art. It's simply about developing a good website and going through the process of improving the site and continuing to make it more and more Googlicious!

At James Good Limited we believe in putting our money where our mouth is. With this in mind (and with our new website settling down and being spidered by the major search engines) our thoughts have turned to improving our own Google search rankings. On the following pages you'll find alphabetical lists of keywords and search terms that we have chosen to work on and our website's respective positions in Google's search results for each one.

In the UK there are three methods of using Google to search for websites, each generating slightly different results:

using google.com,
using google.co.uk,
using google.co.uk with the "pages from the UK" option selected.

As a comparison we will search for each of our search terms in the three methods as well as appending our search terms with our relevant regions. For example: we'll search for "Design Agency" (ie entire UK) via the three Google methods and then perform the same three searches for "Design Agency South Wales" and "Design Agency Swansea".

The results of our searches with the keywords and respective positions of our website (jamesgood.co.uk) will then be recorded in the tables along with the total volume of traffic for that 30 day period (quoted from Google's analytics). The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate how simple SEO really is and how it can improve the visibility of your website and increase the volume of website traffic.

Methodology

To improve our website's rankings we will be developing three aspects of our SEO:

Content
The most important element of any website is well written headings and copy, with structured markup and properly stuctured sentences containing the desired search terms. Just this will do wonders for the ranking of your website. Google likes at least 200 words of content on any page.
Meta Data
Page titles, keywords and descriptions. Whilst some meta tags are given little value by search engines they can provide invaluable information to search engine users. Some meta tags are given heavier weighting by spiders to determine the content of the page.
Linking
All links to and from your website should be clearly labelled and relevant. Search engines not only look at who links to your site but also what content and ranking they have. The more relevant the links the better. Good internal linking is vital for easy navigation of your website.

After the launch of a new website or to simply improve search rankings we recommend our clients give us one day a month to work on developing their search engine optimisation. To demonstrate exactly how much of a difference this can make, we will spend no more than one day a month working on improving our own SEO. All results will be collated on or around the 20th of each month starting from 20th January 2010 and running until 20th July 2010.

Although it'd be nice, we don't expect to achieve top position for each and every one of our search terms. At this stage dramatic improvement is the result we're looking for - first page for the majority of search terms would be a good start!

That's the plan... here's where we're at:

Google.co.uk Search Rankings
Google.co.uk (pages from the UK) Search Rankings
Google.com Search Rankings