TABLE OF CONTENTS
WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICES
— Website Consultation
— Domain Name Registration
— Website Hosting
— SSL Certificates
— Website Migration
— Website Maintenance
— Website Design
— Website Development
TYPES OF WEBSITE DESIGN
— WordPress Template Site
— Basic WordPress Site
— Business Website
— E-Commerce Website
— Online Booking System
— Portfolio Website
— Custom Website Design
— More Website Design Types
I have been involved with SEO since the early days of my Website Design career dating back to 1999; – soon after completing a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineering qualification. Being at the right place at the right time back then was key to sparking my interest in Search Engine Optimisation and becoming a SEO Specialist and SEO Consultant.
The SEO industry has changed in so many ways over the years but yet remained the same as far as Technical SEO is concerned. Many SEO strategies and search engine ranking techniques used back then will get your site in hot water today. Many of the now-debunked methods are still completely valid although pertinent that they should not be abused.
The plethora of search engine success factors should all be taken into consideration when trying to get a website ranked above it’s competitors. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords… not so much the fuss now days some say; – well I agree to disagree. Work hard at getting your keywords/phrases ranked but don’t stop there. The aim of SEO at the end of the day is to get conversions. This is where Koala Design’s SEO packages excel at influencing Google’s knowledge graph, help your site rank for relative terms and give your business website a boost in rankings and traffic.
SEO is a timely process; – an extended game of chess against Google’s Search Algorithms. Know the rules and don’t rush your next move.
OPTIMISATION
Relevant content creation Original ContentSEO STRUCTURE
Formulated SEO Mobile FriendlyCOMPREHENSIVE CONTENT
Content is King WordsmithAt Koala Design I offer a series of auspicious SEO Services that if seen through comprehensively are sure to give your website ranking a boost and generate a better return on investment. Ultimately I prefer to develop a website from scratch rather that muck about someone else’s framework.
I build solid SEO engineered website frameworks with WordPress and use it’s inherently embedded template system and plugin architecture to design beautiful user experience orientated, search engine optimised websites.
Koala Design’s websites are built with SEO 101 principles in mind but this is only the beginning of a long digital marketing road to the top. Quite often but depending on your market and competition; – my 101 SEO framework design will suffice in getting your website on page 1 of Google’s search results page after which my SEM Campaigns will do the rest; – assisting in strengthening your Google rankings.
Staying ahead of the herd and offering high quality SEO has not been harder than it has become in recent years with the explosion of SEO service providers offering marketing strategies and posting articles on how to optimise your website flooding the web. Becoming a good SEO consultant and offering sustainable SEO results takes a lot of SEO training and practise. As an established SEO Company in South Africa I pride myself with maintaining high level search marketing services to out clients.
These services are listed according to a presumptive ‘Brand New Website’. If you have an established website; – You won’t necessarily be able to skip some of the proposed steps and catch up half way down. The only real benefit you have is that your site has a history with favourable SEO data.
As for a more competitive market; – I suggest you follow the SEO advice outlined below.
SEO Services
The order in which you follow these steps depends on what stage your website is at. The SEO formula below has been devised to guide you on your path to creating a website from scratch. Have a look at my SEO Info section for a summary of services or Get in touch with me and I will send you a comprehensive quotation of SEO costs and all steps included. You can also have a look at my SEO Pricing page which will give you estimates of what you should expect to pay for any of my SEO services mentioned in this post.
Step 1
Content Creation:
Creating comprehensive, in-depth content for your website can be a daunting task. The content creation period, from my experience is usually what business owners struggle with. I usually insist that the client draft the initial content as only they know the intricacies of what their business has to offer and are aware of details that fully answer a searcher’s questions.
I usually request clients to make a list of their top 10 keywords or key-phrases around each service category or product and then to use those keywords to create at least 4 paragraphs of content with a minimum of a 250 word count around each topic to get the groundwork of great content out of the way. With rigorous industry research and my SEO experience I can assist in creating first-rate optimised content for your website.
Step 2
Keyword / Phrase Research:
Researching niche keywords and phrases relating to your business services and or products is incredibly important during the content creation phase of your website.
The easiest way to rank your website, increase your clickthrough rate (CTR) or to get relevant traffic from Google or other search engines is to include content around the right keywords people are using to search for topics relating to your business; – in turn sending more people visiting your website, reading the content or buying your products or services online. Search trends, searcher intent and objectives of a searcher are all important factors to take into consideration when doing content research.
Combining an informational search term and a transactional search term for an online shop for instance and narrowing the gap of guessing the objectives of a searcher is necessary as variations in wording can have noticeable effects on the user intent. By delivering targeted organic results and Google suggested keywords to a searcher one can reduce the cost per acquisition.
Koala Design’s Keyword Research service will assist with your content strategy by helping you discover new long-tail keyword ideas related to any topic which you can add to your content keyword map. Established sites can make use of this service to garner additional terms not currently in use on their sites.
Create long, nuanced and in-depth content that covers 100% of your topic.
Step 3
SEO Framework:
A solid SEO Framework and Website Architecture should be the cornerstone of your business website if search engine traffic, top keyword rankings and conversions are important to you.
I design user experience optimised, accessible, responsive and mobile-first websites with search engine optimised site infrastructure. For more info please refer to my Website Design Services.
Step 4
Website Structural Audit:
Your first Website Audit will garner crucial data regarding website errors, warnings and other issues according to the latest W3C standards, protocols, technical specifications and guidelines. The W3C web architecture focuses on the foundation technologies and principles which sustain the Web.
HTML (the Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are two of the core technologies for building Web pages. HTML provides the structure of the page, CSS the (visual and aural) layout, for a variety of devices. A diligent audit of your website will reveal source code issues that require attention.
Step 5
Content Optimisation:
This step deals with improving your initial content to include the necessary keywords and phrases collected in Step 2. Many clients are afraid of having too much content on their sites; – apprehensive of promoting a bad user experience and often leaving out key characteristic and unique content regarding the business’ services and or products. Having inadequate content will unfortunately not get you the necessary traffic and rankings you need to give your business an online omnipresence. It has many times over been proven that longer content outranks shorter content.
This task deals with writing a lot of repetitive yet intelligently structured paragraphs, sentences, phrases and statements as each “key-word” should be combined with supplementary and relevant keywords in meaningful sentences creating different phrases around fundamental topics in your content with meticulous consideration of your keyword density.
This extended LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keyword version of your content should also be structured correctly with formatted content; – your first 7 paragraphs containing the pertinent information to your readers.
Laying out your content with the use of whitespace and narrative structure is extremely important with keyword rich content ensuring a simple and elegant web page that improves readability. It is important to calm your audience and not just bombard prospective clients with a lump of text.
Koala Design’s pragmatic SEO approach will assist with the structure and layout of your website so that the user experience is a favourable one. My Copywriting and Content Optimization services persistently produce excellent copy for the web that increase sales, hits and visits to your website.
Step 6
Social Media Integration and Configuration:
Integrating your social media platforms with your website is crucial to generating leads from social media campaigns that target individual categories of your service offerings.
I strongly recommend that you embed as many of the “Big 7” Social media platforms. These are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (Google My Business), LinkedIn Business, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram when applicable.
Many business owners are reluctant to include social media platforms as they say that they never use them.
Koala Design offers very powerful Social Media Campaigns that systematically deliver content to your social media platforms and strengthen your indexability with Google and other search engines. In fact I insist that you make use of this very powerful social marketing strategy as a source of traffic and to expand your network.
Step 7
Website Publishing, Verifying and Indexing:
Once you have published your website and it has gone live it is time to ensure that Google and other search engines have properly indexed your website. This involves verifying your domain or pages with Google, Bing and Yahoo and ensuring that your website is being crawled by the major search engines. Once indexed it could take up to 90 days to appear in search results of the various search engines.
Monitoring and analysing your traffic at this stage is important to ensure you have no broken links and or stray traffic.
Dealing with stray 404 not found traffic can be painful. Generally new sites do not have this issue but they will creep into your analytics sooner or later and when they do it is important to conclude which links are worth fixing and which should be ignored. Fixing traffic worthy 404’s can have a favourable impact on your website’s traffic.
Koala Design’s Website Submission and Content Publishing services assist with speeding up the indexing process, setting up your sitemap and excluding pages that shouldn’t be indexed.
Step 8
Technical Site Audit:
At this stage I recommend doing a Technical Website Audit to ensure everything is in place and functioning correctly within the framework of your website.
My technical audit involves looking at well formed HTML code, appropriate implementation of cascading style sheets and how well integrated dynamic features react and comply with accessibility standards. I validate all web-pages, check the markup and validity of server-side languages and report any discrepancies.
I do an analysis of site speed tests in order to reduce bandwidth use and server load.
I perform mobile and responsive website fluidity tests; – ensuring your site flows and adapts to any screen regardless of device, size or orientation. I conduct cross-browser comparability tests to ensure your website displays correctly across the most popular web browsers.
Other website performance testing involves inspecting website navigation, page redirects, site search functionality and the effective use of calls to action.
Technical audits of online shops deals with the many intricacies of E-Commerce platforms.
Step 9
Search Engine Results:
Once you have hit the rankings in Google for instance it is time to check how well your content is performing by doing a Keywords/Phrases ranking check.
There are various software packages and companies that offer a keywords rank check service although many of the advertised methods and especially the free ones are not very accurate or use cached data. The Google API limits search requests and to therefore get accurate results; – one has to look for a more professional service offering that can deal with the amount of keyword positions that you wish to check and produce a progressive and dependable report on keyword fluctuations.
Koala Design’s Keyword Ranking Check service uses various software packages to check and authenticate fluctuating keyword ranking positions.
Data from the search engine results page (SERP) will assist in leveraging your content strength and enable you to deduce which content is performing better that others. Ideally we are looking for a page one Google listing within the top 3 SERP positions. Achieving a #1 ranking on Google will generally require more aggressive on-page and off-page optimisations, an extensive SEO Audit to analyse your competition and target driven SEO Campaigns which is briefly covered in the next step.
Step 10
Content Marketing / SEO Campaign:
Focusing the marketing of your content on initially the most important keywords and phrases from Step 2 will improve the rankings of these keywords which are of utmost importance to you as the business owner.
Koala Design has developed a very powerful Content Marketing strategy that incorporates an Effective SEO Campaign which begins with a Social Media campaign that focuses on each keyword or phrase individually. My SEO strategy has been implemented across several niche business models and has never failed to impress on the rankings of the key terms used.
My SEO Campaign is a flagship service and I pride myself with the effectiveness of this service. It is a lengthy process and can take from 6 – 8 months to gather full speed due to it’s progressive nature. This keyword specific campaign runs continuously year after year as a monthly subscription package.
Each Search Engine Optimisation Campaign targets a keyword with 7 phrase variations and builds a constructive deep-linking network across your brand. I keep track of each campaign and it’s relevant target phrase; – ticking each one off the hierarchical keyword list.
Additional campaigns can be added to the subscription package at any time.
Step 11
Competitor Research:
As a SEO Marketing Company in South Africa I have dealt with diverse industry types and have done extensive SEO Competition Analysis and research into the mechanics, characteristic peculiarities and technicalities of these industries. My competitive marketing analysis strategies assist in increasing your traffic and making your website more profitable.
Researching the competition in your industry is a quintessential SEO tactic used to enhance your SEO Competitive Research and Analysis Workflow.
In order to dominate your industry online you will have to investigate the effectual SEO factors used by your competitors and determine which search terms are sending them the most traffic.
The constructive SEO data collected will assist in creating more substantive content by revealing which keywords are most valuable and how competitors write about targeted keywords. Garnered information can assists in optimising your link building strategies and bolster your SEO efforts by improving your rankings even further.
Incorporating the Koala Design Competitor Analysis and Research service data into your online footprint will reveal key SEO components as to why your competitors online presence is flourishing and take you one step further in dominating the top search engine results and in many cases; – combined with an additional SEO campaign will allow you to conquer the local rankings for your service or product.
Step 12
Holistic SEO Audit:
My unabridged website audit inspects a website’s SEO ranking factors and ingredients which influence the search engine crawlability and indexing of a site with the aim of improving the overall SEO performance of a website.
A thorough site audit can reveal a wealth of invaluable information about the composite structure of your website, it’s off-site ranking factors, social media influence and especially with Koala Design’s SEO Audit; – details about intricate SEO elements that competitors use to rank higher and how to harness these SEO components in order to improve your rankings and increase your organic traffic as well as uncover problematic areas that need improvement.
As a SEO strategist I am able to refine your content strategy and advise on which keywords are more likely to increase your organic traffic as well as devise an action plan to improve your off-page ranking factors that influence the Google RankBrain algorithm like website relevance, popularity, it’s trustworthiness, and authority.
Koala Design’s holistic SEO Audit evaluates your site architecture and the search engine friendliness of your website. I offer a complete internet marketing strategy to reveal new opportunities and sources of traffic in an effort to increase social visibility, promote sales and conversions and ultimately outperform the competition.
Step 13
Link Building:
Building links to your domain and landing pages can be time consuming. Ultimately the more powerful your content is the more likely it will be that someone links to your content pages. In receiving natural links to your articles it will become evident that your content is performing well.
Internal and External link building can also be dangerous if done incorrectly by inadvertently passing Page Rank or by randomly paying for links and not adhering to white-hat strategies.
Adding links that do not fall within the webmaster guidelines can affect the performance of your website as a whole.
Koala Design’s Link Building service will assists in researching possible domain authoritative links that are relevant and relate to your business which will help search engine traffic bring the right audience to your website and boost your organic traffic. Knowing which sites to target and which to ignore will save you a lot of time.
Koala Design is an efficient, reliable and trustworthy Website Maintenance Company in South Africa. I have 3 Search Engine Optimization Packages listed below that offer maintenance and Personalised SEO Services. I map each client’s top-level goals to SEO efforts and tactics to produce a custom-designed SEO strategy.
Each package has 3 modules of implementation depending on the website type i.e. Basic, Business and E-Commerce. These are not checklist SEO services but rather bespoke SEO strategies based on a company’s business goals. Updates, feedback and recommendations will be included in a monthly Website Performance Report.
All monthly SEO Performance Reports will include amongst other relative info; – an overview of your website’s content, it’s layout and aspects of your website’s health status like uptime and crawl errors as well as a brief report on WordPress SEO Maintenance completed, confirmation of database backups and website framework updates.
Maintenance packages allow for minor editing of pre-existing content at no additional cost although pricing of maintenance packages depend on the amount of website content i.e. pages, content, products and media files but this will be discussed in your website maintenance proposal.
Updates regarding your website backlinks, malicious back-links and your domain disavow file will also be included. We’ll also report on any structured data updates concerning schema markup and website microdata.
All reports include a Google Analytics Account Assessment with detailed information on;- Overall Site Visits, Unique Visitors, Organic Visits, Visits and Bounces by Source, Top 10 Cities, Social Metrics and Traffic from Social Networks, New Visitor Acquisition from Social and Social Referrals. Multi location businesses also receive provincial data with information on the top cities and locations visiting your website which can assist in optimising your sites Local SEO performance.
All maintenance packages have a minimum subscription period of 6 months.
FUNDAMENTALS SEO
There is no such thing as cheap SEO although this SEO fundamentals package is a kickstarter SEO essentials package that mainly deals with the technical aspects and 101 SEO principles of search engine optimisation; – ensuring that your website adhere’s to search engine optimisation guidelines and recommendations from Google and other top SEO specialists around the globe in an effort to improve organic traffic to your website. As a business owner your aim should be to maximise profit without cutting costs at the expense of lost sales and revenue.
There are many SEO guidelines on accomplishing an optimal website SEO structure on the net with varying information regarding what the best SEO specifications and optimisation techniques are and how to implement them.
Koala Design is a professional, reputable and ethical SEO Company in Cape Town and has over the years kept up to date with the most recent SEO trends. I am able to effectively implement a robust search engine optimised website architecture.
Technical SEO 101 principles include amongst others the following monthly website optimisations and tasks.
- Setting up and management of Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Console including domain verification.
- Ensure proper management and implementation of on-page SEO aspects that could affect your Google rankings like ‘Page Title Tag Optimisation’, ‘Meta Keywords and Meta Description’, ‘HTML and Header tags’, ‘Keyword emphasis’, ‘Content Quality’, ‘Duplicate Content’, ‘Intelligent linking’, ‘Image tags’, ‘Image data’, ‘Sitemaps’, ‘On-Page Content Distribution’, ‘Internal Site Links’, ‘Link Structure’ and ‘Website Indexability’.
- Monitoring of certain Off-Page SEO factors like ‘Link Quality’ and ‘Anchor Text Spam’
- Ensuring your website is protected from intrusion and has not been compromised which could have detrimental effects to your business’s rankings. If any website security issues are not detected in time and promptly fixed; – your website may have a hard time to regain it’s trust with search engines.
- Monitoring website’s traffic to repair broken links, disavow spam links, repair HTTP response codes and crawling errors, redirection of website traffic where necessary which improves the overall user experience and Google PageRank.
- Improvements to your website’s ‘Page Speed’ and systematic updates to website image compression ratio’s according to Google’s recommendations.
COMPREHENSIVE SEO
This package is recommended to most small business SEO seeking clients. It implements all the SEO foundations laid out in the SEO fundamentals package and includes a complete SEO Audit of your website once every 6 months and deals with on-page seo techniques and off-page website optimisation directives and errors.
It includes a ‘Competitor Analysis Report’ during the subscription period of 6 months which reveals key insights in to why competitor websites are ranking above you for certain keywords and gives recommendations on which keywords and phrases to include in your content in order to compete for higher rankings.
FULL COMPLEMENT SEO
This is my most attentive SEO package on offer. It is the only package that offers industry exclusivity on a national level. Local business industry, keyword and product Exclusivity Contracts are available on request.
This package includes all particulars of the above mentioned SEO aspects as well as a ‘Koala Design Deep-Linking Campaign’ of your main keyword during the course of the 6 month subscription period.
This package integrates meticulous digital marketing tactics and strategies to consolidate SEO efforts in a relentless attempt to ensure you are listed at the top of your industries’ search engine rankings.
The Full-Complement SEO Maintenance Package leaves no stone unturned in it’s vigorous attention to detail and crusade to achieve more leads and higher conversion rates for your business.
Koala Design’s SEO Services and Campaigns consist of individually selective Search Engine Marketing Services.
My Comprehensive SEO Prices page elaborates on many of these services.
Please select which of the Service Offerings you are most interested in.