Don’t be fooled by anybody who says they can guarantee you appear at a particular rank in any search engine. The search engine companies like Google are constantly changing and refining the method they use to rank website searches.

Optimising your website with the keywords and key-phrases your customer base will find you with will enhance your chances of better page rankings in the big search engines.

Why is this important?

Search engines are by far the most popular way for customers to quickly find what they want on the internet. The younger generation have been brought up using Google or Yahoo and they will be your potential customers in a few years.

Search Engine Market Share 2009 - Source searchterms.com

What is SEO?

SEO is the art of making web pages more readable to the major search engines for specific keywords.

This gives your web pages a better chance of getting included in a high position in the search engine page results for those keywords.

How much does SEO cost?

This is dependant on the amount of content your website has, how much it needs to be modified for the keywords you and placement you want to achieve which is usually linked in with an internet marketing campaign.

For new clients with no previous website we perform a free one-off SEO exercise on the website content when first launched.

For clients with an existing website we would recommend a rolling 6-month Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign which would include SEO, content creation, Social Media marketing and link building.

What does SEO work involve?

There are two components to SEO work; organising the web page content and validating the HTML code design.

It would be a nice world if web page content was 100% separated from the design (how it looks), however, presently this is not the case.

The text within a page can be changed to contain more relevant keywords for your business and this is one aspect of SEO work.

However, the content that’s placed on a web page, the text and images, is mixed up with the HTML code that is used to display it.

The HTML code allows, for example, images to be included, titles and headings to be styled and text to be emphasised in bold or italics.

Search engines, when reading a web page will look for certain HTML codes such as a main heading “H1″ and give the text contained in it more relevance over, say a lower level heading “H4″, which is the way it should be.
Also, if some text is emphasised in bold, then a search engine will assume that it’s meant to be more relevant and stand out against the context of the surrounding sentence or paragraph.

As search engines can’t “read” an image or any text contained within it, the HTML code allows for descriptions to be associated with an image on a page.

This is the crux of SEO work and can be done as a one-off exercise, however, it’s more effective if done in conjunction with an internet marketing campaign.

Can I do it on my own?

If you have good HTML skills, access to the design files of your website and of course the time to do it then yes.

However, having a fresh pair of eyes look over the content and design can work wonders.  Also, search engine algorithms do change periodically and of course your competitors are likely trying to keep ahead of everyone as well, so it’s a very changeable area.

This is why it’s best to let a good SEO company handle this for you.

Give us a call on 0800 44 88 960 to find out more information about how we can help with SEO for your website.