What's New @Quoin

Quoin built the new download feature on Atom.com

Dave Williams, CMO of Addicting Games talks about gaming and community in a cnet article

The Health Central Network is featured in a recent Washington Post article on online health.

Join our team! Check out Jobs in Boston, Durham and Charlotte area

In Focus

Since 1994, Quoin has built sophisticated applications for media, publishing, retail, finance, life sciences, and other industries.  Read more ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plan

Overview

Quoin has extensive experience in building sites with outstanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and search results ranking in Google, Yahoo, Bing (previously Live), and other search engines. We understand that SEO is a function of both site design and engineering decisions. Our approach is to provide tools that enable a client to create a content-rich site, and to build an infrastructure that supports effective search engine indexing.

First, we work with our clients to increase interest in their site and inbound links. A content-rich site will yield significan improvement in SEO. Extensive and engaging content will create a reason for other authors to link to the site. This aspect can have the greatest affect, since genuine external links are known as a primary driver for search engine ranking. The key tactics include the following:

Second, the site must conform to well-defined practices for search engine indexing. We believe that this is the most effective approach for SEO, and does not rely on attempts to 'game' the indexing and ranking of sites. Quoin focuses on the following tactics during design and implementation.

We see this process as focused on creating a site and content that adheres to the guidelines published by the major search engines. Our approach does not use schemes to artificially increase SEO, since this is not a viable long-term approach. Some examples include:

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

Search engines examine a site based on the content at each accessible URL. Thus, the initial focus for SEO is on URLs for improved search engine ranking. Please note that any URL changes can temporarily degrade search results ranking. We therefore try to maintain the same URL for corresponding pages in the a new CMS whenever possible. Yet, search engine-friendly URLs can have a significant affect on SEO. The URLs should contain keywords that refer to the content of the page itself. The keywords will be separated by hyphens, since using no delimiters or underscores hampers indexing by search engines. This ensures that the URLs are meaningful to both search engines and users. In addition, we will fix broken or duplicated URLs within the site that would be a detriment to SEO. Adding permanent redirects ensures that we do not create orphan links throughout the site.

Metadata

Quoin will ensure that the site pages consistently use well-formed and meaningful metadata. Our team will maintain any current metadata, including pate titles and keywords, as part of any SEO. In addition, we will work with client stakeholders to define keywords that will yield excellent SEO results. Placing these keywords in metadata and throughout the page itself will ensure that that the high search engine rankings are achieved.

Page Content

The site design should use page headers and footers to embed keywords into each page. We will also review the content of each page to maximize the use of keywords in headers and other content.

Static Content

While much of the content in the new site will load dynamically from a CMS content repository, Quoin will design the site to appear statically to search engines. This is accomplished by maintaining consistent, static URLs for all pages. These URLs will also appear to be html pages by containing an .html suffix. In addition, as much site content as possible will be placed in static portions of page templates, such that they do not depend on the database values. Finally, QUOIN will develop static index pages for major portions of the site. These index pages will not be navigated to within the site, however will provide an entry point from users entering from search engine results and will cross-link to the rest of the site to improve rankings.

XML Site Maps

Our team will generate a sitemap for the new site, and assist the client in registering with Google.com, Bing.com (Live.com), and Yahoo.com search engines. A sitemap helps ensure that a site is easily indexed by a search engine, and is a vital aspect of SEO.

The XML site map contains much of the same data in a raw XML format. It is not intended for human consumption. The site map contains the last modification time for each URL on the site. The XML site map is not directly reachable from the site. Instead, the XML file will be placed at the root of the site and that location will be both submitted to each search engine and recorded in the site's robots.txt.

Index Pages

To ensure that the search engine spider finds all of the site's pages, we will create one or more index pages.The index pages are human-readable HTML pages with groups of links broken down into sections. They are similar to a traditional site map. The index pages will be directly reachable from the site.

The link pages and XML site map are both derived from the navigation structure maintained in a CMS. They should not be maintained manually. Instead, a scheduled task will generate the raw navigation data and then transform it into both the link pages and the XML site map. (Quoin uses such a system on our own website.)

Verification

The major search engines require verification of a site. The site will be registered with the following verification services:

The search engines generally require the inclusion of a specific tag for site verification.

References

Last modified: 8/6/09 3:28:57 PM