SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or website optimisation.

SEO is taking a website and during construction or after construction applying certain criteria to it so that search engines such as google msn aol etc can find it, index (list) it and getting it's pages as high up as possible for keyword / phrase searches.
In plain English, getting your site to the top positions in search engines for your chosen words and phrases.

So why is this so important? Well if you have a website and you want people (customers) to find it you will have to get into the search engines for starters, otherwise the only people who know you exist are the ones that you have told your url to. It is important to get high up in the listings because users of search engines rarely go past the first few pages of results and competition for these positions is fierce. Once you have a good listing it is worthwhile paying a nominal fee to keep it there.

Right, now that we have a basic understanding of what we are talking about let's have a look at the subject in a little more depth.
So you have decided that your website needs some search engine optimisation done to it. What next. Well you could do it yourself if you know what you are doing but this can sometimes do more harm than good. (however, I shall be including some basic do's and don't's later) or you could hire a search engine optimisation company to do the job for you. Please feel free to contact us for a quote. E-Mail

With the latter option be very careful of who you choose. Some companies will guarantee to get you to number 1 in the search engines and will charge you a packet for it. They will claim that they have insider knowledge of how to get you to the top and just recently I heard of one company who guaranteed top 5 result in google for any single keyword listed in 5 days. Now lets take a look at this, it is impossible to make such claims and guarantees as the search engines change the way they rank sites on a monthly basis, if these companies do get you a top ranking quickly (I have seen this done) the chances are you will soon begin to slip and if the company has used tricks such as same colour text as background or link farming, you may even get a ban from the search engines which can be very difficult to recover from.

Things you should check for in an SEO. Ask to see references and examples of work.
Ask if they would mind you calling their clients to check that they really have done the work. Look at the results and see how many sites were returned for the chosen keywords, it's easy to get to number 1 if you are only up against 10 other sites. Ask which engines they will be submitting your site to, it should be to the top ones such as Google, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, Hotbot, Overture, Teoma, Yahoo, Alltheweb etc.

How long should you have to wait before you start seeing results?
This depends on the search engine, many search engines now have a paid inclusion option which will get you a listing in about 48 hours, this listing is refreshed approx every 48 hours and so you don't have to wait too long to see if any changes you have made have had an effect.
Google has recently gone through some major changes and In my opinion for the better. If a new site has links to it then Google will pick it up within a few days to a couple of weeks. By far the best way of getting listed in the major search engines is to have other websites link to you.

More information and basic search engine optimisation stratergies.

Contact: - Gary Bagshawe 52 High Storrs Road Sheffield S11 7LE, Tel 0114 2685648- Mob 0771 8629770