Working With the Search Engines

“Can You Get Me to the First Page in Google?” 

visuaLATTÉ provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through a dedicated SEO partner with whom we deliver integrated web design, web development, and SEO/Internet Marketing packages.

This way, we provide a high-quality, well-coordinated product for you in one development cycle, saving you the inconvenience of having to separately hire one web developer (who may not understand or appreciate SEO) and an SEO firm that lacks a clear understanding of the goals of your recently-finished website design & development project.

Below is our method of working with search engines:

1. We don't advocate any underhanded techniques designed to “game” the system. Your ultimate goal is to serve your customers and visitors, and search engines are constantly evolving to better reward websites that are truly relevant to the search being performed, while weeding out and penalizing those acting less-than-honestly.
2. SEO, and the larger concept of “website findability”, are not simply the process of “getting you to the first page of Google search results” but a more specific process of understanding who is looking for your service and how best to let them find you via the Internet. This often involves setting goals for specific search “keywords” that potential customers are typing into search engines, using social media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to advertise, raise awareness, or generate links into your website, and other strategies.
3. “Organic” SEO, which means optimizing your site such that it naturally appears near the top of the search results for various keywords, is a valuable but long-term project. For quicker results, we also help you with Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which refers to the buying of ads which appear at the top of the page or on the sidebar of search-result pages.

Even if you do not hire us and our partner for a dedicated SEO or SEM campaign, we do provide these SEO-friendly techniques as part of a typical website design & development contract:

1. We structure our web pages in an SEO-friendly manner, meaning we use meaningful page titles and header text, search engine friendly (and user-friendly) page URLs, in addition to standards-compliant HTML source code. The CMSs we use give great flexibility when it comes allowing webmaster and client the ability to tweak their sites for best search engine performance.
2. If your page addresses change, we use 301 redirects, meaning that both visitors and search engines will be redirected to the new page seamlessly. There are various reasons why page addresses and structure change when a website is being redeveloped, and using 301-style redirects help ensure that no one receives the dreaded “page not found” error - which, among other things, causes search engines to penalize you.
3. We make it easy to maintain blogs, news feeds, or similar tools for keeping your site's content fresh, which is good both for your website visitors and your search engine ranking. Although search engines use complicated algorithms for judging websites, they certainly value fresh content over stale and will reward you accordingly.