Top Spot for Garden Design Websites

In today's computer oriented world the internet appears to be king! Every business wants to be top of the Google listings and garden designers are no exception. Employing a website designer is vital not only to achieving a good-looking site but also for providing the knowledge and expertise of the behind-the-scenes working of the internet and its search engines. However, just as garden designers are always appreciative of a client who knows about gardening and plants, website designers are very happy to work with clients who understand what is required to achieve the Holy Grail - top of the listings.

In reality it has to be realised that achieving that top spot can be very difficult for a small business, if not almost impossible, without paying for a sponsored link. However, the chances of being ranked near the top can be improved by utilising the black art of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. SEO is the process that enables Google and other search engines to easily find and categorise a website. They can now make sense of the content and decide for themselves the topic of the site rather than needing to be told, therefore the content of the site is key to achieving that high position.

The first page and its content is crucial to the success of the site's positioning and should contain words and phrases that might be entered into a Search Engine to find the site such as 'garden designer cambridgeshire'. Information that would help categorise the designer, such as home county and locations the designer will travel to, should also be included on the home page for example 'Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire and within easy reach of Milton Keynes'. The title of the page can contain other keywords and obviously the name of the designer should always be included! Anything that might set the designer apart from others should appear on this first page such as a specialism in gardens for the disabled.

Having links from other websites is also a very important factor but can be difficult to achieve. Of course designers can register with gardendesignunlimited.co.uk and be added to our free Find A Garden Designer directory with a link to their website!

Other technical tricks which the website designer should be familiar with include using html markup correctly. For example headings on the website should use the h1, h2 etc tags to indicate the relative importance of the section. The <strong> tag should be used to emphasise specific aspects of the content and all images on the website should include an alt attribute. To check if this has been done move the mouse cursor over an image - a little yellow box should appear containing a description of the image.

Finally, make sure the website conforms to the W3C standards. This makes it easier for Google and other engines to search and also more likely the site will look the same in many different browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari etc).

As icing on the cake use Google Sitemap to help Google understand the layout of your website.

Once the site is up and running it can be useful to know how visitors are finding the site, as well as how many hits the site receives and the most popular pages. One of the best ways of doing this is to use the free Google Analytics tool. The results of this analysis can help with future development of the site to optimise its success.

Any website that uses all these 'tricks of the trade' stands an excellent chance of appearing high up the search engine rankings resulting in an increase in potential clients. Hopefully an indication of this will be a red hot phone!

© Sharon Brown 30th March 2008