Renton Web Design, SEO, Graphic Design, and Web Hosting from Hood Web Management

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is best described as designing a web site so that it will rank well in search results for its topic.  Search Engines base their rankings on a number of factors.  “On-site” factors are related to the actual web site itself, and is primarily based on the coding of the web design and the content of a site (particularly text).  “Off-site” factors can be described as how your website interacts with the rest of the internet, and is mainly based upon other sites linking to your website, and how they link to your site.

Our new customer web design package comes with standard on-site SEO “best practices” already implemented. SEO is as much art as it is science, though, and there are a number of aspects of your site that can be improved and tweaked endlessly. We firmly believe that our standard SEO package will serve the needs of most small businesses.  However, we also offer additional SEO services at our hourly rate for those companies competing for difficult keywords or seeking a more targeted internet presence.

Other Notes on SEO:

White-Hat vs. Black-Hat SEO: Since the key search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing keep their search criteria somewhat secretive, there is a lot of debate in the SEO community as to what constitutes good and bad SEO practices.  You’ll occasionally hear the phrases ‘white-hat SEO’ and black-hat SEO” thrown around as well.  Essentially, white-hat SEO consists of playing by the rules to ensure long-term viability of your website.  Black-hat SEO, on the other hand, consists of using controversial and sometimes underhanded or downright malicious techniques to rank higher in search engines.  While black-hat techniques may work some of the time, they are rarely in the client’s best interests in the long-term, and as such, Hood Web Management uses only accepted white-hat techniques on your web sites.

Recommended Small Business SEO Resources:

For a longer explanation of SEO, wikipedia’s SEO article is a good place to start.

SmallBizBee.com recently wrote a great article concerning SEO for small businesses.

SERPRank.com has some decent primer articles regarding SEO techniques.

Finally, SEOMoz covered The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO. (All of which is covered by Hood Web Management’s SEO package)