Search engine optimisation

Any site can be number one in Google but few are chosen

A website will be more profitable if it can be found in Google and the main search engines. There are many ways to drive traffic to a site but search engines account for about 80% of all internet traffic. So any successful web project should start by considering how to get good search engine rankings for the key-phrases that your prospects will use to find you. That will ensure that you attract a decent volume of pre-qualified visitors - people actively searching for what you offer.

By good ‘search engine rankings’ we mean that your site should be listed on the first or second pages of any search against the key-phrases we agree you should target. According to a recent study by KellySearch, 93% of people don’t search beyond the first two pages - the top 20 listings.

There are two ways to use the search engines to attract pre-qualified visitors - search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) AND LINKING

Search engines are looking for two things in a web page - relevance and ‘link popularity’. They infer relevance from the keywords and phrases that you feature on a page, and they check the pages that are linking to you to ascertain your ‘popularity’.

The more content you have featuring your targeted key-phrases and the more inbound links you have from highly rated, relevant pages, the more likely you are to get good search engine rankings.

To get these good search engine rankings, we need to identify key-phrases which your prospects use and which, ideally, your competitors do not target.

SEO is a process - not an event. The search engines have different criteria for assessing pages and they change these regularly. They ‘spider’ or inspect sites at varying intervals too. Google, for example, places more emphasis on your inbound links and, amongst other things, the Google ‘Trust Rank’ of the pages linking to you.

Our SEO and linking service includes:

• researching the best key-phrases to feature on your site
• helping to create content that’s written around those phrases
• writing your html tags and ensuring your site is listed in the top search engines
• reviewing search engine ranks after three months, your web traffic stats (see below) and the number of enquiries generated
• tweaking the site, if required, to improve your rankings
• identifying suitable linking targets and persuading them to link to your site. We expect to identify sites which would be worth paying for links
• providing you with further search engine rankings reports and recommendations for improving and maintaining your search engine positions.

For a new site of say 20 pages, the first three tasks would take about four weeks and would happen during a site’s development. The other tasks occur at regular intervals over the six months after a site goes live.

Timescales for existing sites are broadly similar unless a site is already indexed by Google, in which case it may achieve results more quickly.

It’s important to recognise that SEO is not a quick fix solution and will not produce instant results. It’s an investment in the medium to long term visibility of your site.

For quicker results in the form of instant traffic, you will need to invest in pay-per-click advertising.

To find out more, call Paul or Steffan on 0845 303 3001.