professional website design & development

RipplePoint is a website designer located on the Gold Coast near Brisbane, and we also specialise in Search Engine Optimisation (or Web Optimisation).

What is Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (sometimes just called web optimisation) is essentially about being clear on what you want your site to achieve, and then making the site and the individual pages of the site visible and relevant to both search engines (such as Google, Bing, Ask, etc) and search engine users. There are primarily two ways that your site can get displayed (or listed) on search engine results pages:

• Organic listings. The search engines (such as Google) use software programs to crawl around the world wide web looking at pretty much all the website pages they can find, and then record information about them. Later, when someone types in a search request, they compare the request against the information stored in their databases and display a list of the web pages that they think will best answer the request. You are not charged anything for this type of listing.
• Pay Per Click listings. You can pay to be listed on a search engines results page by using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google's Adwords service. PPC listings can achieve results almost instantly. However once you stop paying or 'bidding' your website will disappear altogether. PPC listings are displayed on the same results page as Organic listings, but usually in a seperate section of the page (e.g. Google displays them in the "sponsored links" sections of its results page - usually the top three listings, with a shaded background, and the listings on the right hand side of the page).

Can I Do My Own SEO, or Should I Get Help From an Expert ?

The purpose of organic search engine optimisation is to achieve long-term high ranking listings in the free section of the search results, ensuring that your website appears 24 hours per day, rather than just when you are prepared to pay for it. Despite what many people might initially think, organic optimisation is not a one time thing, where you optimise your page to get a good ranking, and then just sit back and enjoy the ranking for years and years.

There are many reasons why this isn't a reality, and why you should keep working to optimise your site on a regular basis. Google considers many factors when deciding which pages to list as most relevant on their search results page- they don't just check the word/s being searched for against all website pages to find out which websites include those words the most. For example, Google places a reasonable amount of importance on fresh content. Google can tell if content is fresh, because they know it wasn't on your website the last time they crawled it.

In Google's opinion, people are more likely to want to see things that were written recently rather than those written a long time ago, which might now be out-of date. And sorry, even though adding fresh content on a regular basis is likely to be helpful, the new content on its own is not enough to get the SEO job done properly. Have you included the optimal keywords appropriately in your content, your headings, your page title, and in the various bits of code that untrained people don't see? Have you added appropriate tags to your new images or pictures? Have you updated your sitemap so that Google can easily find your new page?

There are dozens of little things that need to be considered when optimising your site, and it is the combined effect of all, or at least most, of these things getting done well that helps to achieve a high, and lasting, ranking with the search engines. And this is where RipplePoint can help your business succeed on the internet.

What Can RipplePoint SEO Do For You ?

Whenever we build a website for a client, we start them off on the right foot:

• We talk to our clients about what they are trying to achieve from their website.
• We consider the search terms that people might use to try and find the site.
• We establish how important search engine results really are for the site. For most clients they are; but for some it is not as significant.
• We build sites which give our clients a good, and appropriate, start on their search engine optimisation journey.
• We try to instill in our clients some knowledge about what needs to be done in the future to maintain and improve their site's search rankings. We are available if they want to use us on a regular basis in the future, the choice is theirs.

We find that the time required to provide SEO services is very particular to the needs of each client, and as such, we don't advertise standard SEO package rates. If you are interested in using RipplePoint's SEO services, please contact us for more information or to arrange a quote.