Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an important part of webdesign and many website owners are anxious to get top search engine rankings for their sites. There are a number of legitimate ways to improve search engine indexing of websites, such as writing good content, and making the site easy to navigate for both human users and web indexing robots.

But watch out!

Unfortunately, some companies are taking advantage of the general public's legitimate desire to make sure their target audience can find them on the web. SEO companies often do more harm than good by using outdated or illegal tactics that are just as likely to get your site's listing removed altogether for violating the search engine's guidelines as they are to bump your page up a notch on the list.

How we do it

Kosada sites all come with a basic level of "built-in" search engine optimization. We do not charge you for it as a service because, the way we do things, it's not a "service" — it's a standard. Our sites are designed with accessibility and usability in mind every step of the way — only if a user can find it easily, load it quickly, and use it effectively does it pass our test for good design. We streamline our sites with lean code that leaves the maximum room for relevant text that will help both users and robots understand the site.

A little extra something...

But for some of the companies we serve, especially those designed to serve a community outreach function, the basic level of "built-in" SEO is not enough. They want to make sure that the maximum number of the people who could benefit from their services are reached by their website. So Kosada now offers additional SEO options that are included with the rest of the site proposal at a fraction of the cost of the services of a specialized SEO company. These can include (depending on how much you want to invest in your SEO (but are not limited to)):

Standard search engine optimization techniques:

These things are included in the way we build all our websites.

• Proper use of tags and structure is just plain good design. Instead of making a heading by typing a style tag like <font size="huge"> we use proper heading tags, at proper heading levels, like <h3>. Information is organized in lists, like this one. Information is conveyed in text, not text-in-images that both search engine spiders and people using screenreaders are blind to.
• Proper labeling – every image gets a descriptive, relevant alt attribute and title. Links get titles too. This is good for SEO because it's a legitimate place to put keywords, and it helps accessibility by allowing screenreaders to compile usable links lists. Similarly, when data is presented in a table, we include descriptions and proper heading labels using the <th> tag.
• Clean URLs – example.com/index.php?mode=view&style=red gets read by search engine spiders as "example.com/index.php" and everything after the question mark is lost. (reference: [evolt.org]

Basic search engine optimization techniques:

A little extra time can go a long way for SEO.

• Adding description metadata to your site – gives both users and search engines a quick first-impression overview of your site, and gives you a little more control over the snap-judgements of both your viewers and indexers.
• Basic configuration of path alias rules changes something from example.com/node/1235 to example.com/content/My-Cool-Thing. Since search engines tend to place a lot of importance on words appearing in the path name, this is big.

Advanced search engine optimization techniques:

These things are a little more labor-intensive but give good results if rankings are a priority for you.

• Adding description metadata to each page of your site – similar to the basic metadata, but gives unique information about each individual page rather than the overall site as a whole.
• Adding geolocation (latitude and longitude) metadata to your site – increases your chances of inclusion in fancy mashups
• Advanced configuration of path alias rules – example.com/Really/Cool/New/Thing is going to attract more attention than example.com/content/Cool-Thing (which is itself better than example.com/node/349872)
• Configuration of an XML sitemap – tells robots which content you want them to look at, in what order.
• Submitting for you, or helping you submit, news updates as keyword-relevant press releases on sites like PRLog.

Things we will NEVER do:

(If Google figures out that you are trying to do any of these things, it will likely drop your site, usually for around 6 months.)

• Link farming – a practice in which a company places links on all its client sites to all its other client sites, regardless of how useless and irrelevant these links might be to the page they actually appear on.
• Markov-engining – a practice that involves a random text generator to trick search engine indexing spiders into believing the same page is in fact a different page, or that content has been updated when it hasn't, when the spider visits a second time.
• Keyword-stuffing – an annoying practice in which keywords are jammed into places where they don't really make sense. Giving a picture of a tree, or worse, an empty pixel, an alt attribute of "Tractors John Deere Kubota Rototillers Farm Equipment Superstore" is keyword-stuffing. Filling up visible paragraphs with words that are unrelated or tangentially related, but make it hard to read the actual text, is also keyword-stuffing.
• Text-hiding – a method by which text (usually a meaningless string of keywords) is hidden somewhere on the page by making it the same or almost the same color as the background. This is murder on accessibility and Google really hates it too.
• Any other outdated, harmful, dishonest, black-hat methods. Surely there are ones we haven't thought of, since we don't do them so we don't sit around thinking about them.
• We also DO NOT guarantee any particular ranking for any particular keyword (e.g. "You will be #1 in Google for the phrase Britney Spears"), ever. Anyone who does is gambling (at best) or lying (at worst). We can only guarantee that we will use all the industry-standard best practices and we won't do anything that might get your site penalized or dropped from rankings.

We also have various statistics and tracking methods available. If you're interested in tracking reports for your website, let us know at the beginning of the project and we can set up a tracking system that meets your specific needs.

We make all our sites easily navigable and browser-compatible. After all, what good is being the top hit on Google if your target audience can't figure out what to do with your website?