Search Engine Optimisation

Once Flarebox has been installed and you have added your content, you have a shiny new website, but that is just the beginning. If you move house you tell people your new address, if you build the best hotel in the world it remain empty unless you spread the word and it is the same with websites.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the art of tweaking (optimising) your website so that Search Engines can easily find your website and are more likely to recommend it to your desired visitors.

To read some of our FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) have a look at the SEO category of our Knowledge Base.

The art of SEO is split into two parts:

Inside the website

Search engines will look at the website with one key question: "how relevant is this website as a place to visit for this search" to work out the answer they will analyse some key elements of the website. Every version of Flarebox comes with the following SEO modules free of charge!

• Keywords
• Page Title
• Page Description
• URL
• Page Content

Everywhere else

Search engines are always a little bit suspicious about relying too heavily on what they find inside the website - it is too reliant on the owner saying what is credible - far more value is given to what others say / think of the website. A large number of different algorithms will be used to calculate where to list you in the results and two elements are of great importance:

• the value given to the external reference (more weight given to the BBC / CNN websites than to your chum Fred Smith's website).
• the relevance of that reference e.g. a link to your website in a list of links, better would be a reference in an article, even stronger is an article where the content is directly relevant to your website, and if that content / subject is something for which the referring website is ranked highly, then so that boosts your rank even more.

Tackling SEO external to your website is not easy, where internal SEO can be set up with your website and tweaked as you make changes, external SEO is a more intensive and less certain business. It can however be looked at in two ways:

• Automated push - where the website makes use of external sites to build those references.
• Marketing - the hard slog in building awareness of your business outside the organisation

Flarebox has modules which can help with automated push:

• Twitter
• Social Bookmarking
• Ebay (in development)
• Amazon (in development)

However the marketing can't be done by the website - by its nature it needs different tactics and Designtoo can assist you with this, talk to us about what you want, there are lots of possibilities. Marketing works online and off, from business cards and other company stationery to advertising campaigns our design skills cover regular print as well as web work. Online we can advise on connections, forums, networks and online advertising. Marketing can be hard work, but very rewarding.