Search Engine Optimization « Dragonfly Networks

Due to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that we signed with our client on this project, we are unable to link to the website for this recent project. But we can tell you this much:

The client is a major, national law firm.
They had already chosen Joomla before we joined the project.
The site was completely overhauled.
We integrated SEO methods and techniques into the Joomla CMS.
The site went live a short time after our work was completed.
Our clients seem to be happy with the site and the traffic they are receiving.

Since I can’t disclose the site in question, I can’t point out the nifty user interface features, the wonderful drop-down menus, the features provided through RSS integration, or much else, you may be wondering, “Why write about the project at all, if you can’t talk about it?”

Which is a good point. I wish I were able to outline the great, cool features of the site, like the header-banner-image rotator, and I really wish that I could go into detail about our experiences with Joomla compared to our preferred engine, WordPress, but another time, I suppose.

In any case, I can talk a little bit here about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), why it’s important, what role Dragonfly Networks can play in integrating SEO into your website, and why WordPress is still our preferred content management system, even when taking SEO features into account.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

From Wikipedia:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

Basically, what that means is that SEO is a collection of methods and techniques that can be used to help websites become better known through existing search engines. By optimizing your website for search, you can mightily improve traffic in terms of quantity, quality, and frequency, and using SEO methods and techniques properly can be the deciding factor in terms of whether or not your online business succeeds.

Why is SEO important?

Well, to be honest, SEO is only important if you view your website, your reputation, and ongoing web presence as an investment. If your site is a hobby, a site you run for fun, a school project, or just a way to share photos with your friends and family, then SEO may very well not be important to you.

Our team of web developers takes SEO seriously, however, because often, we are charged with helping our clients manage their investment dollars. When they hire us to manage their web development project, we are often faced with some difficult decisions in terms of how to allocate their (usually limited) resources.

Since we’d like our clients to become wealthy and prosperous and continue to hire Dragonfly Networks for all their web development needs, we’d like to also help them maximize their Return on Investment (ROI).

That means making sure that not only does a site have a great visual design, but that it also has great content for visitors to enjoy. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Nick or myself will necessarily write the content, but it does mean that we try to help our clients find their “voice” on the web.

So that’s one area where we can spend quite a large amount of time.

We also spend a large amount of our time helping clients decide on navigational structures that are easy for their clients to use, so that visitors to their website can read about related topics, or sort posts by chronological order, or browse the site by category if they choose.

(That’s the “Information Architecture” piece of the design phase, and as you can tell from the name, this phase can also eat up a large chunk of the project budget.)

That’s not even touching on the Graphic Design phase, the Logo Design phase, the Site Typography phase, the Custom Functionality Phase, or… well, you see where I’m going with this. Basically, there is never quite enough money in the budget, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to make sure that each of these things is fairly and equally considered.

In any case, our clients almost always want the site and logo to look nice, and they want the typography to be modern and appealing, and they want the content to shine, and they may also want additional functionality… but each of these things eats into the hours we can commit to their project, and one of the most frequently overlooked areas of site development is SEO.

Of course, as we mentioned before, if your site is just a hobby and you only spend time on it so you can share your vacation photos with your family, well, you probably don’t need a lot of SEO done.

But if, like the majority of our clients, you want your glorious content to be easily found by potential visitors, and you want the maximum ROI you can get from your investment in web development, well, then you want SEO, and you want it from Dragonfly Networks, because we’re the best.

How long has Dragonfly Networks been practicing SEO?

That’s kind of a long story, beginning with the first humble HTML/CSS sites Mark Beihoffer built back in 1996/97, when he still worked at the bank, to the custom Content Management System (CMS) he wrote for his uncle Bob’s first website, to the

The short answer is that Dragonfly Networks has been optimizing sites for search since before the great Google™ even existed.

How can Dragonfly Networks help with my website’s SEO?

If you asked me to list all the different methods, techniques, tactics, and tweaks you can make to your website to try and improve your search engine placement, it would take me longer to answer your question than it would take me to build an actual website.

Suffice it to say, we’d prefer that you come to us *before* you start your web development project, rather than halfway through or after you’ve launched the site. That way, we can help you decide what your options are from the beginning. Sites that are built with SEO in mind provide a much more stable foundation over the long term than sites that have SEO considerations “tacked on” as an afterthought.

Since we don’t always get our way, however, sometimes we’re asked to help sites add SEO capabilities during the site’s construction, or after the site has already gone live. In those situations we can certainly still help, but it is inevitably more expensive and probably less effective than engineering the SEO functionality into the site from the beginning.

In any case, ask any of our many satisfied customers: Dragonfly Networks knows the routine, the ins-and-outs that the other sites won’t tell you about, and we know what kinds of results to expect from a given project. We’ll give you honest estimates, tell you when we don’t know the answer to one of your questions, and we will never promise you results that we can’t guarantee.

(If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard our competitors claim “We can guarantee you’ll get top-ten results on Google™ if you just pay $X_DOLLARS to participate in our latest promotional campaign”, well… I’d start a coin collection.)

We are the ♠Aces♠ of WordPress, and our SEO methods and technologies are second to none. We stand by our work, and can show you the Google Analytics results we need to prove that we know search.

Can you make WordPress work as well as its competitors in terms of SEO?

We can make WordPress work better than the competition. Having used countless Content Management Systems over the years, we eventually learned that sometimes the solutions we tried first are the best solutions.

WordPress has one of the most elegant, consistent, stable, and effective suites of search engine technologies we’ve ever encountered, and despite having installed multiple Joomla plugins, components, and modules, we feel that on this latest project, the client would have had better results if they had gone with WordPress from the beginning.

(This is not to say that the website was a failure; to the contrary, the site is doing just fine the way it is. But it did take an exhaustive, extremely thorough review of the site, countless hours adding, testing, and configuring plugins, modules and components, and a lot of plain old elbow grease to bring the sites SEO capabilities up to the level of our typical WordPress launches.)

This is not to single out Joomla, however; we’ve had similar experiences with Drupal, Mambo, GeekLog, Scoop, and countless other contenders. Generally, it requires from 2-10x as long for us to fully optimize a site running one of these engines than it would have had they originally chosen WordPress.