We follow a clearly laid out process when carrying out search engine optimisation for your website.

Here's a basic diagram of the process followed and each of these steps are explained in more detail below.

The main goal of search engine optimisation for your website is to get your site listed higher than your competitors for the search terms people would use to find your products or services, so that you get more visitors from the search engines.

Generally the higher you are listed in the results of a search engine, the more targeted visitors you'll get. To receive the most visitors to your site, you need to be on the first page of 10 results and as near to the top (No.1) as possible.

So, the most critical part of the search engine process is the correct selection of keywords to use on your website. Keywords are the words that people type into the search engines when they're looking for information. i.e. ‘restaurants London', ‘cycling tours', ‘chartered accountant'.

These keywords need to be chosen carefully because, if they're too broad such as ‘restaurants', ‘accountants' etc. it was be extremely difficult to be listed high in the search engines and also these visitors won't be targeted to your products or services. Also, you need to target keywords that are very relevant to your business. There isn't any point targeting say ‘cleaning services' when you're a gardener for instance. Firstly, Google won't like this as they take into consideration the theme of a website when deciding where to list it and also visitors won't be happy and leave your site quickly when they discover that your site isn't about the topic they were searching for.

The choice of keywords also affects how many visitors you're likely to get to your site and the investment required to reach a top listing. Some companies promise no. 1 listings but the keywords used aren't ones that people search for, so the likelyhood of visitors is zero.

We use a number of tools to help choose the right keywords for your site and start with an analysis of your main competitors as all we need to do is beat them in the search engines.

So, we start with competitive analysis. We study the sites of your competitors who have high search engine rankings and find out the keywords for which they are ranked. We use this research to decide which keywords to be targeting with the optimisation we're doing on your site. We also analyze your recent web site stats (if we have access) so that we can see how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and what keywords they are using.

Using the information gleaned from above we then carry out further keyword analysis and research using professional keyword tools. Through this research process, competitive keywords relating to your website and unique to your business are discovered.

The next step if you have an existing site is a website analysis. An overall analysis is first done on your site, to assess what is needed to best optimize it for the search engines. Based on this analysis, we suggest the necessary work that needs to be done. This may include: design, layout, navigation, colors, background, fonts, images, broken links, web copy, html validation, loading times, search engine rankings and creating error pages.

All of the factors listed above have some influence in attracting search engine spiders and visitors to your site. These factors are already taken into consideration (which makes it much easier) if we design your site from scratch. An established site already indexed by the search engines will need to be thoroughly analyzed for errors before optimization can begin.

After this is done, we move to on-page optimisation. On-page optimisation is the part of the search engine optimisation process that is carried out to the pages of your website. This includes work such as title tags, meta descriptions, heading and alt tags.

At this stage of the process it may be necessary to rewrite the content of your pages. The content of each page needs to be written is such a way that it becomes search engine friendly and relevant to the keywords while remaining appealing to the surfer. The optimisation of the content helps the search engines to crawl your site and then rank highly. We also consider your internal linking at this stage and the use of a sitemap. The sitemap helps the search engine spiders to find all of your web pages easier.

Then we move to off-page optimisation, which for the most part is link-building. Link building refers to the number of links pointing to your site, from other sites on the Internet. It may also be referred to as Link building, In Bound Links, Back Links, etc. The Search Engines consider your site important and rank it higher if other sites link to your site, especially high quality and relevant websites. There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One type is to trade links (Link Exchange), where you give a link from the links page on your site to the partner sites. The second method is to establish only "incoming links" also called ‘one-way links' or ‘non-reciprocal links". With non-reciprocal links, you do not need to link back to them. Our main focus is on 'one-way links' as they offer more benefit when optimising a website.

There are several ways of developing 'one-way links.'

1. Submission by hand to relevant and high quality directories

2. Articles written and submitted to various websites.

3. Press release

Review of Search Engine Listings and Website Statistics

After each month, we review your website statistics and your positions in the search engine listings. Your website statistics tell us what keywords people have used when they went to your website. We use this information to determine what further work needs doing and also for ideas of new keywords to target. The review of your positions in the search engines helps us to see how well the link-building is working. This information allows us to reevaluate our specific approach to keywords and link-building for your unique business. If for example, some of your pages have reached the no. 1 position then we would recommend only enough link-building to maintain this position. This saves you money as you won't be paying for something you don't need.