A basic website health check is a systematic method used by our SEO team, who look at your website to see if there is anything stopping the major search engines from finding your website. 

Although it is called a basic health check, it is actually quite a complex look at the coding, links, copy and many other features of your site that search engines look at to determine how high you should rank for a particular keyword.

The basic health check is suitable for small-to-medium websites that have never had any SEO work done before and want a good starting point. You can use the recommendations highlighted by this health check to improve your own site’s ranking or alternatively we can quote for any specific work you’d like carried out.

The in-depth website health check is a comprehensive look at many aspects of your website. We look at all aspects of the site's content / links / coding, and so on, and give detailed guidance on how these can be altered to improve your site’s ranking.  The health check also gives you a benchmark to enable you to assess the effectiveness of any future SEO work.

The in-depth health check is suitable for those businesses which are serious about improving their branding / leads / sales over the internet.  If the advice / guidance contained in the report is adhered to, it is an extremely powerful and cost-effective business tool

Search-engine submission is a way of letting the major search engines know that your site exists, so it can be placed into their index. It may well be that your site is already indexed as there are links to it from other web pages in which case, we will let you know exactly which pages are indexed and who is linking to you.

Finally, some good geeky questions – just what I like!  Meta-data is the code in your website that allows whoever has built it to communicate with the search engines.  It often doesn’t tell the full story of your site and what it’s all about, and is sometimes missing entirely.  Whatever state we find it in, we make sure that after it’s been into our SEO surgery, it clearly conveys your website’s message to the search engines.

Our keyword research starts with you. We gather your knowledge about the people who are likely to visit your site and then research the words and phrases that they are likely to use.  We use large databases of millions of phrases and search terms to determine how many searches are made per day using these words and how much competition there is for that word.

This helps your site as we can pick out the most effective words and phrases to use in your site’s code and content to get you the most visitors.

Great!  Another geeky question!  Sometimes when a website is built, the designers use shortcuts or old techniques which the search engines have trouble with.  We look at the code and identify areas that are stopping the search engines from looking at your site.  Some sites are so bad that the search engines can’t see a single word of text and so the poor website will never be found on any of the search engines. Boo hoo!

Our basic reporting tells you all sorts of interesting (to me, and probably you) information, such as how many visitors you’ve had, what search terms they’ve used to find you, who’s referred them, where they’ve been to on your site, what colour underpants they’re wearing** and so on …

After we’ve done the coding analysis and told you what’s wrong with it, we get our clever bods who know all about computers and stuff that makes them work to fix it!

As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. Or in other words, what’s the point of spending all this time and effort on getting visitors to your website if, when they get there, they see a lurid yellow and purple website with Greensleeves playing in the background?!  Well?  What’s the point?
 
Our super-duper fancy packages have an added report where we tell you all about the design of your website and how it can be improved to help keep visitors once they get there.  Our design team will tell you all sorts of clever things you never knew, about Z-theory, colour and mood, typeface and loads of other design wizardry things.

At its simplezt copywrighting cna make yur sight luk more profeshunal 4 vizitors.

At its best, copywriting is the difference between an average site and a great one.  It can get repeat visitors, get you found by search engines and is generally accepted as one of the best things you can ever do to improve your site’s rankings by those in the know.

Basically, a sitemap is a file that we make that tells the search engines all about the content of your site, how important each page is and how often it is updated.  It helps the search engines by letting them know all about your site and helps your site to get its content noticed.

Directories on the web often have a lot of “trust” from the search engines and when they link to you, they pass some of it onto your site.  We don’t rely on mass submissions using software at IceBlue as this is an old trick well known to search engines, which may harm your site’s rankings (or certainly do them no good).  Instead, we handpick directories with a lot of trust that are relevant to your website’s content – which is a much more effective method in the long term.

As I said previously in the design-review question, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. Or, in other words, what is the point of spending time and effort on getting visitors to your site if, when they get there, they find it so difficult to use and navigate that they leave straight away?  
We’ll share our knowledge of website usability with you, letting you know the best practices, theories and how you can practically incorporate them into your site in order to optimise visitor retention.

I’ve spent far too much time in American search-engine conferences, evidently. Visitor retention?! What’s all that about??

You may think you know your competition, but on the web it’s a whole different ball game. For instance, if you sell trainers, then whoever comes above you in Google when you type in “trainers” is your competition. And this often leaves you competing with well over 1,000,000 other pages. Scary eh?

If all of the above sounds daunting then you’re right, it is!  Luckily, we have the tools and the experience to assess and identify weaknesses in the competition so that we can push your site into the areas with the least competition and the most people. 

Thanks Marie, I just love a challenge!  A strategic marketing plan is a bespoke solution for how you should develop and build on your website’s success over the next year. If updated and referred to on a regular basis, it is an inexpensive and powerful marketing tool.  It covers everything from blogging to email campaigns to seasonal images.  The strategic part means that all of your development and marketing works together so that it has a greater effect on visitor numbers, and so on, than if you did it randomly.  Is that 150 words?  I don’t know but my fingers are tired now so I’m going to stop! You can email seo@icebluemd.co.uk if you need any more information, or visit my SEO blog www.icebluemd.co.uk/seoblog.html to get the latest tips, tricks and news from the world of SEO.

OK, then - one more question!  Footlong meatball and Swiss cheese, toasted on Italian bread with olives, jalepenos, lettuce, onion, gherkins, pepper, mayonnaise and Oregano!!!  Mmmmmmmm …

* not a real doctor
** a geek joke