Search Engine Optimisation

Differences Between Engines & Directories
Directories need sites submitted to them, directories invite submissions, which may be free or require a fee. The submitted information will (usually) be considered by a human editor who will visit the site and assess the submission information to ensure it meets the directory's submission criteria. Directories look at sites as a whole, not at individual pages. There has been major growth in vertical market directories. We have 15 directories that we recommend that all websites should be placed into.

Data gathered by the spiders is fed into the search engine's algorithm whcih determines which pages are listed for each particular search query.

With search engines, each page stands on its own, meaning that each page of a site has the potential to be listed in a search. A site can, in theory, be found for an infinite number of keywords.

Some "engines" buy in data collected by other search engines' spiders which they then feed to their own algorithm. AOL operates this way.

What are spiders, crawlers or robots?
Robots, bots, spiders, ants, wanderers, harvesters...are the names given to the programs sent out by the search engines to gather information.

The spiders collect the following:

• Index page content
• Trace and verify links
• Validate HTML code
• Detect new content
• Check for duplicate content
• Detect spam

Keyword Research
In order to ensure you place your site in front of your target audience you must ensure that you are optimising for the key terms your potential audience is actually entering into the search engine, we can handle all the keyword research for your site in order to organically place your website in the listings. Choosing the RIGHT search phrases is the single most important thing you can do as an early step.

We will look at the following and use the appropriate tools to conduct effective research:

• Research the key phrases your target market actually uses
• Aim for targeted traffic rather than high volumes
• Observe your target audience's online behaviour
• Aim to get your website listed in the top 30 within 3 months
(recommended plan applies)

What is PPC?
PPC is a way of buying your way to the top of the search engines, it is essentially an auction in which the highest bidder attains the highest rankings for a selected keyword phrase.

The most important PPC providers are:

• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Google Adwords
• MSN (Live).com

Both Yahoo! and Google send results to other engines. Yahoo! Search Marketing provides the top listings in Yahoo! AltaVista, Wanadoo, MSN UK (at least currently), although this could change tomorrow. Google Adwords sends listings to some other important engines including AOL, AskJeeves, Tiscali, Virgin.net.

Building Link Popularity
A web sites' popularity component provides the search engines with feedback about a site's usefulness to a target audience. If two websites had similar text and "search engine friendly" architecture, the site with the greater popularity will consistently rank higher over time. Duplicate content also applies when copying text from other well established websites, no white hat SEO would ever consider copying another website's content.

• Link Popularity
  Link popularity refers to the number and quality of links pointing to a web page
• Link Reputation
  Link reputation holds the key for the search engine to determine what other sites are saying about you