Ingress Online is a Sydney-based web site design and development company specialising in building high quality, easy to use web sites that can be updated by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
We are located in Glebe in Sydney's Inner West.

Design Services - Print and web

Based on the look of your web site or brochures would you buy from your company?

Ingress Design offers professional corporate branding and design services.

Whether it be professional corporate branding or web site design, we can design a solution that will reflect your image the way you want.

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Interactive Business Web sites

Are you after something more than a basic web site?

Do you want to sell your products online? What about polls, blogs or maybe add a forum? We specialise in building interactive web sites to engage your web visitors.

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Small / mini / micro sites

Do you already have a web site but need a micro site for a special promotion or event?

Ingress Online can create special smaller sites with added interactivity to capture your visitors for competitions, events or polls.

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Improve your search rank

Tim O'Brien* believes businesses need to optimise their websites to make search engines take notice and give their sites the prominence they deserve. He outlines these optimisation processes below.

"Why doesn't my website come up in Google when people type in....?"

If you've spent good money building your enterprise's website, you no doubt have asked this question at some time or another. We all would love to see our website listed on the first page of Google's results for search terms relevant to our site.

But it doesn't just happen automatically - you need to optimise your site to make the search engines take notice and give your site the prominence it deserves. The most important optimisation processes are discussed below.

Check which of your pages the major search engines have indexed

If your website has been up and running for a while, there is a good chance the major search engines have indexed some of its pages. But have they indexed the entire site? And what do the listings look like?

To check which of your pages the major search engines have indexed, enter the special search terms as follows:

Search engine

Special search term
All the Web (www.alltheweb.com) domain:www.yoursite.com
AltaVista (www.altavista.com) domain:www.yoursite.com
Google (www.google.com) www.yoursite.com site:www.yoursite.com
Teoma (www.teoma.com) www.yoursite.com site:www.yoursite.com

Select your page titles carefully

By far the most important step you can take to optimise your website is to customise the TITLE element for each individual page, using keywords to match the content of the page.

In choosing the keywords for any given page title, be aware that search engines look to see whether the keywords also appear in the body of the page. Search engines assume the most relevant pages will be those that mention the keywords more than once. In particular, make sure you include some of the keywords in the page's major heading, as defined by the page's H1 element. (In HTML, the tags H1, H2, H3,…,H6 can be used to define different levels of headings, in much the same way that word processing software uses headings).

If you use a database to generate content dynamically, you should also generate the page title dynamically, ensuring that it reflects the content of the dynamic page.

Select your page META elements carefully

A META element is an optional line of HTML code contained in the HEAD section of a Web page. META elements are used primarily to define the page's metadata; that is, to describe the contents of the page. You should customise the META 'description' and META 'keywords' attributes for each page on your website, ensuring that they adequately describe the page's contents.

Ensure each page on your website is reachable from the home page

You should build a home page that provides the major links for the site and ultimately links to each page on the site through a hierarchy of links. If you want a search engine to find and index your dynamic, database-driven content, your site must contain one or more pages that include links to each of the valid records in your database. Of course, it is very important that your site does not contain any broken links.

Select file names for non-HTML resources carefully

Specialist search engines (such as Google Image Search and All the Web) that index non-HTML resources, such as image, PDF, audio and video files, rely heavily on the resource's file name when evaluating its relevance to a particular search term. It is therefore important to use descriptive file names for each non-HTML resource used on the site. Not only does this improve the chances of generating some traffic from specialist search engines, it also makes the site easier to maintain.

Select the 'alt' attribute for non-HTML resources carefully

Specialist search engines that index non-HTML resources also rely on the resource's HTML 'alt' (alternate text) attribute when evaluating the relevance of a particular resource to a given search term. It is therefore important to include a short, sharp, but meaningful and descriptive alt attribute for each image, animation, audio and video resource used on the site. Not only does this improve the chances of generating some traffic from specialist search engines, it is very important from a usability perspective as it enables users to browse with images turned off or while waiting for images to load.

Seek to improve your website's link popularity

A website's link popularity is measured by the number and 'quality' of inward links from external sites. Improving your website's link popularity is an extremely important website promotion strategy for two reasons.

First, the external websites that link to your site will definitely deliver traffic (although the amount of traffic that each site refers may be a mere trickle).

Second, some of the major search engines - Google in particular - include link popularity as part of their algorithm for measuring the relevance of a Web page to a given search term. The search engines' rationale is that if a website has a high number of inward links from external sites, it indicates a high level of external or 'peer' approval and, as such, is more likely to be found useful by the searcher.

It is important to note, however, that the quality of the inward links is also very important as an inward link from a very popular web page is considered to have far greater value than a link from a page that has no inward links of its own. As such, there is absolutely no value in participating in link schemes designed to increase your site's link popularity. Besides, most of these schemes are run by spammers who simply want your email address to sell to other spammers.

Consider pay-per-click advertising

But there is only so much you can do. Rather than waste time and money trying to 'out think' the search engines, the most sensible thing is to take care of the things you can control (as above), and then let the search engines take care of the rest. If you really want to guarantee a steady stream of search engine referrals, consider investing in a pay-per-click search engine advertising campaign through Google AdWords (adwords.google.com) or Overture (www.overture.com).

*Tim O'Brien is the founder of Web Strategy Resources, a consultancy that assists growing enterprises to gain a competitive edge through the efficient use of Internet technology. He is also the author of the recently released 312-page book, Exploiting the Internet: a practical guide for growing enterprises. Exploiting the Internet is available through bookstores and from the Web Strategy Resources website (www.webstrategy.com.au).