Union Room Ltd | Web Design Newcastle, Web Design Newcastle upon Tyne

When designing and building a new website, SEO can be an afterthought for many and be seen as a waste of both effort and time as you race to get your site live for a tight deadline. However, building a website is the best time to implement SEO into a new website, as you can build in the easier elements of your SEO without a lot of additional work!

Let’s take a look at 5 easy ways to implement SEO into your new website launch…

Before I begin, this article obviously takes into account you’ve done the whole process of keyword research and analysis to come up with your final list of targeted keywords.

1. Keyword Use In Your Titles

If you’re company name is ‘Jones & Hall Toys Inc‘ then it’s tempting to simply insert that as your title for each page on the your site. This is fine as long as all you intend to be ranked for is your company name. But let’s say Jones & Hall Toys Inc specialise in selling a certain type of fluffy teddy, specifically large red teddy bears. Surely it would make more sense to use keyword terms and phrases that your potential customers will search for? Try inserting ‘Large Red Teddy Bears – Jones & Hall Toys Inc.‘ as your page title on that product page, and carry this trend throughout your site, using the product names as part of your page title.

Try inserting unique keywords into each page in your site, this will ensure your titles are set up for SEO from launch.

2. Keyword Use In Your H1, H2, H3…

Much like your titles, using keywords in your main headers can help benefit SEO. It’s also a relatively easy element to implement and can be integrated into your design. It’s considered a moderately important factor in ranking so try and be thorough when inserting your unique keywords into your headers.

3. HTML Document Names

Try and give your HTML documents SEO-friendly names, for example we name our search engine optimisation page with SEO in mind, so rather than using ‘seo.php‘ we use a keyword-related document name which gives us a little bit of a boost when it comes to SEO.

It’s very beneficial to do this before your site launches as once your site begins gathering links and being indexed by Google, it can be a very time consuming and rank-punishing process to reverse.

4. Unique Content

Using already existing or very similar content to that which has already been written, can really put you into Googles bad books. Google likes unique content, so much so that if you fill your website with lots of pages containing unique text and images, it will give you a great head start in your SEO campaign.  Not only that, but unique content will attract readers and increase the opportunity of gaining links to your website.

5. Make Your Site Standards Compliant

While making your site standards compliant wont suddenly rocket you to the top of the search rankings, making your site easy to crawl can help Google properly index your site in it’s records. Not doing so could put your site at risk of being indexed incorrectly or not indexed at all, which could have an adverse affect on your rankings.

You can check your HTML mark-up is valid by visiting the W3C validator and entering your URL into the system.

So there you have it, a very quick and easy list of things you can do to give your website a good start in the world of SEO. They wont automatically make you top of Google but they will give you a solid foundation which you can build upon in the future.

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It’s tutorial time, we will be looking at creating a nice little sports graphic (finished image below) although the methods used can be applied to many other settings and scenes.  We will be using Photoshop to create the image (sorry Fireworks fans) so without further ado, here we go…

1. Open Photoshop and create a canvas 630px by 340px

2. Find a large picture that will make a suitable setting for a sports background such as fans waving or some nice stadium imagery.

Seeing as though it’s the ashes soon, let’s use cricket as an example.

I’ve found a nice high quality image of a cricket crowd cheering which I’ll use as my background, insert it onto your canvas using good old ‘copy and paste’ or alternatively save it to your desktop and import it in using ‘File > Place’.

3. OK, so we have our background on the canvas but it’s a little too bright to use as a background and may distract from our main image we are going to use. So, lets make it black and white so it distracts the eye a little less.

There are several ways of doing this but I prefer to change the Layer style to ‘Luminosity’ like so:

This will change your image to black and white:

4. This looks better but it’s not sharp enough, so let’s take a look at editing the levels on this to make it a little sharper.

Make sure your image layer is selected and click ‘Image > Adjustments > Levels…’

This will open up your levels options, change them to the levels in the screenshot below (or until you find something you think looks good):

This makes the image a little more saturated and will help the foreground image we use stand out.

5. Let’s use an image of the England cricketer Andrew Flintoff for our main image:

We need to cut around the image. A lot of people use the pen tool but I prefer to use the polygonal lasso tool then fine tune with the rubber tool. Don’t worry about being accurate to the pixel, we can round corners off etc once we have the image cut out.

You should be left with something resembling this:

6. Now we have our image roughly cut out, lets tidy it up by rounding off corners and making sure there aren’t any jagged edges etc.

Select your rubber tool and begin going around the image making sure there are no traces of the background we’ve cut out. I usually make the background layer a garish colour to make sure I can see the sides of the light image clearly like so:

Once you’ve tidied your image up, you may also want to go around the players hairline with the faded rubber tool to smooth the edges of the hair off.

Once complete you should be left with something like this:

You may also want to modify the levels on this image to make it that little bit sharper.

7. We still have a lot of space left on our Sports Scene so let’s try and find a suitable image to use as a secondary image.

We’ve found a nice little image of Flintoff celebrating with his team mates, so let’s use this.

Cut out the image in the same way we did to the main image, remembering to fade any hair off slightly.

You should be left with something like this:

8. So now we have all of our images on the canvas and our sports scene is beginning to take shape but we need to add a little more to make the scene really stand out.

Let’s add a nice confetti effect using a modified Photoshop brush tool. Firstly, we need to add three new layers, one to go above, inbetween and below the images we just created, like so:

Highlight the top layer and then select your brush tool. You may have the brush presets tool already open, if not go to Window > Brushes and your brush presets window should open like so:

Select the ‘Hard Round’ brush like the one selected in the image above, let’s use 13 for now but we intend to change the size for each layer so don’t worry too much about size right now.

We now want to go into the various shape dynamics, scattering options and try to get our brush resembling a confetti stream. I’ve changed the spacing to 27% on the ‘Brush Tip Shape’ section, while you can see what else I’ve changed in the screens below:

You should now be left with a brush slightly resembling a confetti stream which we can use to make our image stand out a little more.

9. Now we have our brush, let’s apply it to our image. We are going to use it to give the effect of the image being layered so we are going to make it go above and around the main image, then above and around the second one before tailing off into the distance.

Select your top layer, make your brush 15px and select a colour from the colour picker (we’ve used white and red seeing as though it’s for an England player).

As you can see we’ve gone over the top of the bat, but don’t worry about that as we can tidy up the edges later.

10. Now select your ‘Inbetween’ layer and do the same, going behind the main image and above the secondary image but this time change your brush size to 11px to give the impression of the brush being further away, like so:

Repeat again with the bottom layer and lets reduce our brush to 7px and have it tailing off the canvas.

We’ve now got our confetti streams finished but let’s go back and tidy up the layers were the confetti goes over the main image. Use your rubber tool to remove any confetti that comes over the top of the brush to give the effect of it disappearing behind the main image.

Repeat this with the secondary image:

That now gives us our finished image, you can of course add some little effects to give it your own personal touch such as blending options etc.

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