"What will your customers see when they search Google for what you sell? Will they see your site, or your competitors?"

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation
Search engine optimisation

SEO, for short

Getting your site to the top of Google (or Microsoft's Bing search engine, or Yahoo! or Ask, or any of the other myriad search engines) sounds like such a simple idea.

In fact it's so obvious that many customers simply assume that once their site is online it will automatically appear in Google or the other search engines. This could not be further from the truth.

Getting those all-important search engine rankings is not so simple. It's all about carefully designing your site so it's easily accessible by the search engines, and making sure you're doing everything possible to achieve the highest listings. Let's jump right in ...!

First, some important terminology, so we know what we're talking about!

  • Search engine optimisation: is the process of designing and refining your site so it is attractive to search engines.
  • Spiders: the "feelers" that the search engines put out - the spiders are automated "users" that will come and read your site, index the text on your pages, and hopefully understand what your site is about
  • Keywords: the phrases that users type into a search engine when they want to look for something - eg, "white trainers", "hairdressers in hampstead"
  • Search engine rankings: when you type a search phrase into a search engine, the order in which the results appear are called search engine rankings
  • Organic search results: also known as "natural search results" - these are the search engine's listings of results for a key phrase that usually appear centrally on the page
  • Sponsored search results: these are the paid-for advertisements, that look very like the natural search results, but are in fact paid-for by the companies who place them. Each time you click a sponsored link the company will pay anything from a few pence to a few pounds to the search engine.

Now you know the terminology we can discuss how to get your site to the top of Google.

The art of search engine optimisation

It's vital to understand that SEO is an art, not a science. If it were a science we could produce a mathematical formula or list of instructions for how to get your site ranked number one. But it isn't. All search engines use different techniques, weigh different aspects of your site differently.

We are search engine artisans. We understand all the subtleties, the nuances, and tricks that are required to get your site ranking highly.

White hat search engine optimisation

Beware! There are many unscrupulous people out there who will claim they can get your site to list highly in the engines. But are they using fair means or foul? Are they doing things (such as stuffing loads of keywords onto one page) which might jeopardise your site's future rankings for the sake of immediate gain?

If your site is found to be using unscrupulous techniques - also known as "black hat" - then your site is likely to banned forever from the search engines. Once banned, there's no coming back. Is it worth using any company whose techniques could result in a ban?

At UKcentric we use only white hat techniques. So we use only legitimate, fair, and recognised techniques, that are accepted by the search engines as fair and above board, to optimise your site. Techniques such as:

  • web site copy optimisation - carefully weighing words and phrases for maximum benefit to both the search engine spiders and your human readers
  • site structure optimisation - designing the structure of your site in the most logical and optimised way so that spiders can easily find and index your text
  • keyword placement - ensuring all your relevant keywords are placed judiciously on the most important pages
  • URL structure optimisation - ensuring your web page URLs are structured right and accurately reflect the structure of your site and the relative importance of each page
  • link building - the most important off-site feature of our service is the building of inbound links to your site from good quality external sites. This is the number one technique you can use to boost your search engine rankings.

SEO is an ongoing process

We build your site optimised from the word go. But search engine optimisation does not stop once your site is built and online. It is an ongoing process of link building, site refinement, and site optimisation. It is a constant feedback loop - carefully monitoring your position in the search engines each week and checking for relevant changes, and acting accordingly.

"It's a strategy that works".

Case study

ArtGallery.co.uk

We built ArtGallery.co.uk a few years ago. The goal was to capture the entire market for online art sales. A very difficult and highly competitive market to enter into. It would require extreme search engine optimisation for this venture to get off the ground.

We chose to concentrate on several key phrase which we identified through keyword discovery tools available to us. The phrases were "buy art", "art online", "sell art online" and a few others. We built the entire site to ensure that any search engine spider would rank these phrases highly if they hit ArtGallery.co.uk.

In a few months we were appearing in Google's search engine listings. By the end of the first year online we were appearing on the first page of Google for the chosen phrases.

By the end of year two we had achieved the number one position for most of our search phrases.

By the end of three years we had achieved the number one position for all our search phrases, and this effort is continuing today.

So you can see that even in extremely competitive and saturated market areas, we can demonstrate our experience of gaining number one position in Google and other search engines in a short space of time and with minium cost. Some of the other search phrases we have acheived number one positions for include:

  • "buy art"
  • "free online dating"
  • "gay dating"
  • "cockney"
  • "cockney rhyming slang"
  • "buy tantalum"
  • "art online"
  • "london slang"

Go icon Why not contact us to discuss how we can optimise your existing site, or build a brand new search engine optimised site that will reach the top of Google!


Share this page on   del.icio.us Delicious   Digg Digg   Facebook Facebook   StumbleUpon StumbleUpon   Twitter Twitter  

See also

Go iconWeb design »
Go iconWeb development »
Go iconEcommerce »
Go iconPayPal integration services »
Go iconSearch engine optimisation »
Go iconFacebook development »
Contact iconContact us »