Search Engine Optimization, Website Development, Marketing & Promotion

Search Engine Optimization, Website Develpoment, Marketing and Promotion.

Not wanting to teach anyone to suck eggs and much may already be known.  We created our Website in a few weeks which has already gained a modest Page Ranking with thousands of unique visitors daily.  The Website was created in HTML with Cascading Style Sheets - CSS. The decision was made not to use Javascript so that search engines could understand the language.

We are Interior Designers and not Website Designers.  The decision was made that we would design, build and manage our own Website to have the understanding as to how everything works.  And no link back to our kindly Website Designer.

Generic naming of everything from images to pages so that search engines understand. Very important in relation to images as they are otherwise unrecognisabe - On our Interior Design Company Website, each image has a generic TITLE, ALT and Description (Each of which are identical.) The power of this alone for your site is huge. Search engines pick up the name of the image (.jpg .gif etc) and the title you have attributed to it

Each of our thumbnail images are "background images" brought in by CSS, which then relate to the larger image at the front end. It looks great to the user if he/she can hover over a thumbnail for the larger image to display as opposed clicking it. If you know of a way of doing this without using Java, please let me know. A very useful resource - CSS Play and CSS Creator .

My take on Google algorythms (very unsure about that spelling :)) is that they are wanting to give their visitors the best results for the search terms used so that they are "useful." "Useful" is the key with any site - My experience has taught that meta-keywords are useless, though I wouldn't put a page up without them. The 2 main aspects are title and description. A useful resource, Site Solutions. I tend to put pages through Delorie's Lynx Viewer  first and read through exactly what the engines will see and importantly in what order, edit the page and then put it through the analysis page.

Then from useful, you go to important. The more a page of your site is listed on other domains, the more important. Reciprocal link exchange works with mutual keywords/tags - My belief is that if you make the back end important, i.e. Our Interior Design Company Directory is a listing of all the best PR ranking UK Interior Design Companies that is not a reciprocating link directory - Has a modest PR of 1 - Does this make DecCardy Interior Design Website "more important" as a resource. We believe so!!

We have 2 satellite sites - The Interior Design Company and  Need To Sell Want To Sell? purely giving us control over which links are where etc. Does this make DecCardy Interior Design  "more important" as a resource. Believe so!!

Submitting URL's to the engines at the earliest possible moment - Whilst constructing is good. Google, Bing, Yahoo  to name a few - Submitting URL's in our opinion via multi submission tools (free or pay-for) a waste of time.

Submitting URL's to both Alexa  and DMOZ  a must.

Google toolbar to establish PR of every site you visit - and maybe why? - Google Webmaster tools to ascertain what's going on very useful. If you are going to get involved with reciprocal linking, you need to check that Google indexes the page you are going to be featured on - Simply take the entire link page URL to a Google search and ensure its listed - You should also be able to see the cache and ascertain the last time the page was cached as a view of how often Google go and have a look!

The DOC Type is key - Strict or Transitional - How do the pages render - are they rendering in Standard or Querks mode? A good resource, W3 Validator  and W3 Schools for establishing DOC TYPE and good tutorials on CSS.

Best to develop a site in Firefox or e.g Opera and then have a look at the problems you encounter in I.E. (Particularly 5.5 and 6). There are fixes.  Browsershots  do a really good screenshot on different browsers - A must.

We use Java for our Stats as the information you get is far more detailed than a HTML script.  These are at the bottom (importantly) of every page and will be ignored by engines and unseen by visitors. If you use Java to showcase your images, engines will not be able to determine anything.

Then there's Twitter, Facebook, Digg and a whole host of other potential social networking/marketing sites...............and an inordinate amount more.

We surely have much to do and much to learn.  However, hoping the above resources are useful and more than happy to take criticism if you feel we are wrong and listen to any constructive comments you may have.  You can email us here.

Deccardy Interior Designers are interior designers based in Dorset specialising in residential interior design, renovation and refurbishment Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon, Somerset, Hampshire, Poole, Dorchester South UK. 

Design & Build  Services Offered  Portfolio Williamstowe  May Cottage  Charlton House  The Cottage  Kestrels  Silver Birches  Design Fees  About Us  Contact


_________________________________________________________