The Thistle Site Design Team has several years of experience in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), both in the design of our own sites and as consultants for other webmasters. Our goal is to develop a balance which achieves accessibility to the search engines while also creating the web presence you desire. Our designs are user friendly, ensuring that your site visitors can easily locate the information, services or products you are providing.

What is SEO?

SEO is the term used for improving your site in relation to it's placement in the search engine index. A listing in the first 1-10 pages is essential to your site's traffic flow. The majority of sites receive visitors directly from search engines such as Google.

SEO is really just common sense combined with good design principles. Without proper optimization your site could be bypassed by the search engine spiders which gather site content to add to their database. There is no wisdom in having a fabulous, high-tech site, featuring all the bells and whistles modern technology can offer, which won't show up in query results because the search engines could not find any relevant keyword-rich, textual content to list the site effectively.

Optimization alone can't guarantee your site will be in the top-ten results and any SEO company making such a claim is not being honest. It will however, ensure that your site will be listed in the search engine databases, without the need to pay for inclusion. It will then come up in a query using keywords included in your site content. We design all our websites with optimization in mind, using methods recommended and approved by Google, the world's most popular search engine. A properly optimized site will achieve successful organic results.

If your site is properly designed, has well-written content utilizing keywords and keyword phrases relevant to the products and services you offer and is easy for site visitors to navigate, then the search engines will like it as well.

• Read Jill Whalen's articles explaining SEO