Search Engine Optimization Help for Mindtree Ltd in Manchester, Lancashire UK

Dave at Mindtree Ltd. asked for a free ranking report and analysis of his website. He gave me a list of single word search phrases which will not produce any meaningful results. The kinds of search phrases Dave should be considering for his website are 2-3-4-5 words long, and most likely geographically targeted to the UK, the Manchester area in the north of England and in Lancashire.

My most fond memory of Manchester was seeing a football match live and in person between Manchester City and Manchester United. The gents in the UK know how to play football!

Dave's website shows 29 pages in the Google index with decent page target differentiation accompanied by geographic targeting. It does not appear that the page targets are based on research. Wordtracker now has a separate database for UK search phrases that is REALLY helpful for UK website owners.

Google shows two links in, gotta have more links.

The web has a robots text file and an xml sitemap. I cannot tell from the outside looking in if the web is registered with Google and Yahoo. It needs to be. The website also needs a html sitemap. Go to Google and search for webmaster guidelines and see what Google tells you about this.

Meta keywords are spammy and not page specific. The meta descriptions could be more descriptive and compelling.

Some of the pages have enough copy to earn a ranking, some do not.

For local search, in addition to having Manchester, Lancashire and UK in the page titles, I also recommend a complete company name and address on every page in the web. This is a credibility issue as well as a geographic targeting issue.

It appears that this website was designed with the new Microsoft Expression Web. The pages show a charset of "windows-1252" which is the Expression Web and FrontPage default. The correct charset, which can be selected by editing the page properties, should be either iso-8859-1 or UTF-8. This helps set up the robots and spiders for easier crawling.

It also appears that this website is a first (and decent) attempt at learning to use CSS. Small serif fonts like the ones used in the top nav bar and the bottom navigation are hard to read. Usability testing shows that reading the screen is twice as hard as reading on paper. Sans serif fonts like Helvetica, Arial or Verdana (this copy is Verdana) are much easier to read on the screen. If you get them to your website, you want to make it easy to read? Yes, you do. Dump the tiny text.

I also note a 1986 copyright date bottom of the pages, which is pre-Internet. The copyright date should be 2007 which shows current content.

This web, which Dave says has been online less than 6 months, if off to a decent start. The pages need to be targeted based on research and the copy on various pages needs to be beefed up to at least 450 words per page. These improvements will bring more relevant traffic which will create more relevant conversions and make the cash register bell ring.

The website has some first page Google rankings for both Google UK and Google worldwide. BUT, if your rankings do not match what people are searching for, you won't get meaningful traffic? Rankings for things people are not searching for are not what will bring success.

Cheers,

Ron Castle