Search Engine Optimisation

The theory and reality of the Internet today are two vastly different things. It is a common misconception that one can create a website, put it online and by the magic of the web and Google, clients will pour through the virtual door. The bad news is that this is quite simply not the case. Google is indeed a fantastic tool, however it needs to be helped to help you. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a skill that people spend many years perfecting and learning. Like the real world, in the virtual world people cannot simply know that your business exists just by virtue of the fact that it does. If you wanted people to find your business in the real world, you would have to advertise it in magazines or newspapers, or you would have to put up signs pointing people in your direction. Unfortuanately the same goes in the virtual world in the beginning. We say 'in the beginning' because the good news about the Internet is that the work you do getting people to your site has a cumulative effect which is similar to paying to put up a sign and then not paying for it to stay there. Yes, you do still need to pay to put up the sign, and you do this by paying an SEO expert to set up your virtual sign. How that expert does this is by advising you on how to setup and run your site. The techniques you are given allow you to reinforce your site's place in the virtual world.

This may seem like a lot of work, but it does come with great returns. Imagine you could print a brochure and throw it onto the street, and then, using a set of SEO skills, ensure that the brochure found its own way into someone's letterbox. Now imagine that, better yet, the brochure would self replicate, and find its way into another person's letterbox, and then another, and then another, until it had found its way into more letterboxes than you could possibly reach in your lifetime. Now, because the same rules apply in the virtual world as in the real, I might open my letterbox and see your brochure and throw it away, or it might be in such a big pile of mail that I never get to it. Google is a sort of virtual brochure sorter. What it does is provide people with a way to quickly sift through all the brochures and only show the ones that I may be interested in. If your brochure speaks of house painting, and I am interested in all house-painting possibilities, Google will show me all the virtual brochures that have anything to do with house painting. The more specific I get, the less brochures are returned on query. The difference between a well-optimized site and one that is not so well optimized is that your well-optimized site (virtual brochure) will appear higher in the pile of returned results. A badly optimized site will also appear in the pile, but deeper down, and as I am a lazy person, I will choose about four or five brochures from the top of the pile and get my house painted by one of those companies.

Many web development companies will claim to know all there is to know about SEO. We are not one of these. Although our expertise runs to as much knowledge about this subject as most other design and development agencies, we are from the schools of thought that if you need your house painted, don't contact a plumber. We have years experience in designing for SEO and understand a great deal about it, and in fact can get you set up with a site that our SEO preferred partners can really work with, and will work with those experts to ensure that your virtual brochure lands at the top of the pile.