What is Search Engine Optimisation - SEO?
According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO could be considered a subset of search engine marketing.
Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages, such as paid advertisements, and organic search results. Search Engine Optimisation, however, is primarily concerned with improving the position of a website on a search engine result page when certain keywords are entered and a search is performed. If a website achieves a good position in a search engine, both the number and the quality of visitors to a website may be increased.
CreatWeb offer Search engine optimization as a stand-alone service in West Lothian. If we have developed your website, we provide initial search engine optimisation as standard to make sure that your website is indexed in the major search engines, such as Google, MSN, Yahoo. SEO is a lot more effective when the optimisation is incorporated into the initial development and design of a website.
My website is indexed... What does that mean? It simply means that Google, MSN, Yahoo has listed your website, i.e. these search engines have created an entry on their search pages. Indexing simply means a search engine knows about you and might show your search engine when a very specific search is carried out - for example a search that includes your company name. Not many people will know your company name though.
A listing does not determine the position in the list though - i.e. the Ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages. If you enter a generic search phrase and your website comes up amongst the first 10 results, then your Ranking is very high. But if you only appear between entries 1000 and 2000 - your ranking is very poor, not many people go through so many search engine result pages until they arrive at the page where a link to your website is listed.
Search Engine Optimisation works mainly on your Ranking and regular SEO should improve your ranking when your most important search terms are displayed.
Let me show you an example of one of our clients - www.creative-camera.co.uk - a wedding photographer from Dumfries. When CreatWeb took over his website in 2004, the website only had about 160 visitors a month. After a complete re-design of the website and lots of SEO, Rod Wheelans now enjoys more than 10.000 visitors per month!
What do I need to optimise my website for?
What website visitors are you after? Do you want to raise awareness about your product? Do you want to sell online? Do you just want to be found if someone looks for a business like yours in your area?
You need to have a goal for your Search Engine Optimisation. What do you want to achieve? Rod Wheelans (Creative Camera), for example, the wedding photographer, wants his website to be displayed in Google when someone enters "wedding photographer Dumfries" or "studio photographer Dumfries". Click on the two links to see where his website is currently listed. Rod is hoping to attract website visitors who are looking for a photographer in his area. If you provide a local service, you can use this to your advantage by simply optimising your website to include lots of mentions of the local area, such as Dumfries, Dundee etc, Fife, etc. By optimising his website for local searches, Rod now enjoys a lot of enquiries that he didn't have before his website was revamped.
How long will it take until my site is No 1?
We are asked this question every time we develop or re-design a new website. No-one can give you a time frame for this. No-one can give you any guarantees. There are a lot of companies out there that claim they get you to No 1 in Google within a week. What they don't tell you is what keywords they use and baffle the unknowing person with. If your company is called "EazyPeazy" for example, and is located in Dundee, then this company will get you to No 1 in Google within a week and they will enter the words "EazyPeazy Dundee" and Voila you are No 1. That does not help you though, because a) you are a new business - no-one knows your company name, b) it does not take any of your website content into consideration, c) all they have done is indexed your website, but your ranking is really non-existent.
If you offer some obscure thing only people with specialist knowledge know about and if you don't have (m)any competitors, your Google ranking can be very good within a very short time - because there are not so many pages to compete with. But if you offer something that is well-known and where there is a lot of competition, it might take you a considerable amount of time until you appear anywhere in the first 10 pages of a search engine. "A considerable amount of time" can mean anything up to 6 months or even longer.