Search Engine Optimisation

Your website is your virtual "shop window". It can hold a display about you, your club, your business... the list is endless. However, for people to stop at the window, and enter the shop to look around – and of course, maybe make a purchase - they need to find you!

Some people may just stumble by, or you can tell your colleagues, suppliers, customers, friends and family about your new address, but it's likely that you really want the whole world to find you. Trouble is there are millions and millions of other sites that are doing the same thing, so you're going to have to give yourself the best chance of letting people know about you.

First steps and best practice

Search engines – the best-known of which is probably Google - are like sophisticated road maps with advertising around the edge. Their main aim is actually pretty simple – they want to offer their users a way to quickly find exactly what they're looking for. That task is made harder than it could be because human nature means that there are always people around that want to find ways to cheat their way to the top of the search lists and then supply the visitor with useless information or links to random or inappropriate content. As a result the search engines constantly have to change the way they index sites... and because the rules are always changing and adapting, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a pretty specialist task.

Good news - we can help!

We can advise you on ways in which you can help search engines identify you as one of the good guys, and to make sure that visitors find you, your product and services quickly and efficiently. We will help you take a few steps towards improved ranking which can start to help increase what's called "organic traffic"... visits that come from people searching and finding you without you having to pay to advertise! Things like...

• Submitting your site to search engines.
• Tagging your content properly.
• Adapting titles and content to includes words which act as signposts to search engines.
• Creating site maps.

These and other key tasks are things which we can work on with you to make sure you have the very best chance of getting seen... but be warned, it takes time! It's not going to happen overnight, so if your site is commercial, you should really plan ahead for this aspect of your site development! It's often an after-thought and if you don't consider it early, it can take weeks to achieve improved visibility.