HostingDIRTFT — An age-old term coined a while back by a leadership training session — is the acronym for Do It Right The First Time. With over 10 years of experience in the field of organic search engine optimization technology, we have made ourselves experts in the field recognized by several authorities in the field such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Ensuring that every website makes use of all the tools that Web 2.0 and SEO has to offer, we can essentially turn any site into a traffic and search engine sponge — drawing in every drop of potential to your site. Our customers enjoy top search engine rankings and high reach. Did we mention? All of this at no extra cost to you.

THE META METHOD

Certainly not the most important, but in order to achieve high rankings with depreciated search engines like Meta Crawler, we ensure that the meta tags of all pages of your website are unique, correct, and descriptive.

Having the correct key words, descriptions, and page titles can help you jump ahead of the competition, but we employ more aggressive and ethical methods to ensure you are not just competing but beating your competition!

WE BOYCOTT FLASH

zero-flashSimply put, most search engines will not index Flash or anything inside Flash — any content in a flash banner is utterly ignored by search engines and cannot be indexed or weighed by these search engines. Therefor we use flash only where we absolutely must (which means never being JQuery, Scriptalicious, etc can easily take its place) or demanded to do so — customers whom demand we use techniques we can prove do not work are not included in our portfolio.

Flash may look flashy and fancy, but what does it matter if you have no visitors? Make sure you think twice before hiring that Flash Developer that promises a polished and shiny website  or demanding your modern web developer to flashify your site, especially considering that the combination of JQuery and PHP can do the same thing and load faster in the browsers.  When major web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Mozilla are not including Flash in their new builds, you have to ask why — We did.

THE SEF METHODOLOGY

SEF, known as Search Engine Friendly, refers to URL structure.  When we run dynamic scripts, calls are made to the server side application in order to pass your imput to the server.  Generally, a plain non SEF url looks like:

www.you.com/index.php?page=23

Most search engines can understand this, but they certainly don’t like it, and Google is known to rate your site higher based on the name of the URL.  For instance, if we turned that URL string from the ugly:

index.php?page=23

To:

www.you.com/NicePage/

Google sees this as a true page title, and thus search terms matching “NicePage” get a heavier weight in the search results.

So, which site do you think would get better results when searching for “NicePage” with similar content?  We can tell you from experience that the SEF URLs will get the vote from Google every single time and that is why we use it.

DOMAIN TECHNIQUE

We may also recommend that you register several domain names — considering that domain names generally run less than $15 per year, it is a valuable investment that will return more search results and visitors than any investment into non-organic SEO techniques (such as paying for Google Ads).

THE ORGANIC METHOD

We do not, nor will we ever spam other websites in order to achieve link building to your website.  Most companies do this, and what is worse than the bill they send you is the high rate of sites Google bans from their search engines because of this “Spam”.

We believe in organic traffic — traffic that is earned and obtained by publishing your site through publishing protocols to lists that exist to do just that, not to spew your links all over the web in hopes someone doesn’t take offense and click it. So how do we do it? Key word placement, descriptive texts, and alternate page generations, and the proper use of cascading style sheets.

We had a client that came to us after using a local “SEO specialist” in the area.  This client suffered from being banned on nearly all major search engines.  After querying the search engine’s staff, we found that this “SEO specialist” sent a bot to post links all over the internet which caused the search engines to tag our client’s website as “spam”.  It ran up more than a $9,000.00 cost to us just to get this client re-branded and brand new content that wasn’t banned.   This client only paid said “SEO specialist” $800.00 for their service — a clear 1,000% loss.

CONTENT PLACEMENT

It really does matter where you place content on your site.  Content in the footer of your site is seen as less important, while content in your header is seen as priority content.  We always take this into consideration when building a page ensuring all your sidebars, widgets, images, and miscellaneous data loads in the BOTTOM of the website’s HTML code while styled to show as you want it in the browser.  Most developers load content as it appears in your browser which is a hurtful SEO mistake.

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PROPER TABLE USAGE

You utterly wouldn’t believe how many developers and web designers out there are still using the 1990′s tables to style and design web pages — for those of us staying ahead of the curve for our clients, nothing is more painful than watching others pay full price for a site that has no chance of ever performing. Before we get into the technical(s) of this, we can make the really simple for someone that is not tech savvy: Would you rather your new house be built from new, quality materials or recycled material from a 1950′s house? This comparison is precisely what we are talking about. We use CSS to design our websites which enables any search engine to easily read your website — making it easier for the search engine to determine what data is relevant and what is not. Tables still have their places in modern code, but not as a feature to style and design a website.  If you are presenting a spread-sheet on your web-page, using a table is great, however Google and many other search engines will only interpret text in tables as spreadsheet data it should ignore.

Ours (SunShineGranCanaria)

(source: http://sunshinegrancanaria.com)

(Note the lack of <table>, <tr>, <td>, and <tbody> tags)

Theirs (Bent8Design)

(source: http://www.deeleeschocolates.com/)

(The use of tables here causes most search engines to improperly index the site)

Now, that is just code, and I understand some folks like to see the actual difference, well here it is, when you actually look at this how a “search engine” will look at it, here is what you see (keep in mind search engines cannot read images, flash, tables, etc — so if it doesn’t generally go strait down the left side, search engines are just blowing past your site)

Ours (SunShineGranCanaria)

(source: http://sunshinegrancanaria.com)

(see how this content runs strait down the left side? Also see how if we “had” to use an image to style the page there is text (duplicating it) just next to it? This is so Search Engines can see EVERYTHING)

Theirs (Bent8 Design)

(source: http://www.deeleeschocolates.com/)
Now lets look at Bent8′s site again and how search engines see it:

(When you can still see “styling” after the style is stripped away, you’re loosing search results.)

For anyone that wants to test this for yourself, you’re invited to do so by downloading FireFox, visiting the above mentioned sites and pressing “alt” then “View” and “Style” then select “No Style”. This is how Search Engines index your site, without a style, and if they can’t get right down to the “meat” of your site just by doing that, they generally don’t expend the resources to attempt further.

Now we hope the folks over at Bent8Design don’t think we’re picking on them because the fact is, there are well more than just them that still use these old practices and the fact is it hurts them and their clients — so hopefully, one day they’ll read our methods and make the necessary changes to their own methods and start developing a “better internet“!

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SCALES OF JUST-SEO

Most of our clients come to us not just in need of a brand new website, but they need customers too. We take it upon ourselves to help these clients generate the traffic they need to hopefully cover the costs of the website and turn the site into an investment and not a liability. When we keep this in mind, we have to place two items of business on the scales: 1 – Search Engine Friendliness and 2 – User Friendliness. Most companies cannot do this without heavily leaning toward one side or the other as some use flash which is the User extreme, and some use only text which is the search engine extreme. This is why we use simple, common sense when applying these methods to our client’s websites weighting out both benefits of each for our client.  Generally, our finished products both look visually appealing and the search engines love it!

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SEO “CREDIT”

In 2010 Google, our Internet’s leader in search engines created a new page-rank policy that has changed the face of SEO techniques world-wide when they decided to rate sites “down” for having excessive links, and sites “up” for having no links. They called it “Page Rank Sharing”, which means if you link to someone from your website, you share a portion of that page’s page rank with the site you linked to. Look at it like a bank account: If you have no money (or page rank) and start linking to other sites, you’re going to be in the hole, and invisible to the world. However, using our techniques keeps you in the “positive” and disallows you from going in the Page Rank hole. There is an exception to this policy — links with the nofollow attribute are not considered as search engines complicity do not follow the link. We have a strict policy on linking with our client’s websites, forcing all links to have the nofollow tag so that their search engine rankings aren’t diminished by comments, “favorite sites”, and partnerships unless otherwise specified by our clients. Enforcing this policy disallows our clients from unknowingly depreciating their Page Ranks.