Use Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing (SEO & SEM) to generate traffic and get many more Visitors to your Website?

Our SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Internet Marketing services are designed to optimize your website so that it functions and performs well in various Search Engines.

One of the more potent marketing tools available is your website, but more specifically, how it is positioned in relation to other websites on the World Wide Web. One of the most powerful methods of ensuring maximum visibility and accessibility in the volume of information on the Web, is to employ SEO, so to understand how SEO can benefit you it is important to learn how Search Engines operate.

Search Engines work off a 'fetch' principle

People who are looking for your specific product or service are fetching that information out of the search engines. If your website is deemed important enough by the search engines, and relevant enough to meet that specific 'fetch' action, your website will be placed at the top of the results.

If the people who are looking for a specific product or service see YOUR website on the first page of Google, matching their enquiry, they are likely to visit your site and possibly contact you.

People who use the Internet to look for products or services have one thing that distinguishes them from people that might be reading about your company in a magazine, or that might have a pamphlet about your company stuffed into their hands on the street corner - people who use the Internet to look for products or services are already interested and possibly READY TO BUY. These people normally have a problem that must be fixed - they need a wedding dress, or they want someone to draw up a business plan for their company, or they are looking for a photographer, or a jumping castle.

They have a specific problem and YOU can solve that specific problem for them through the product or service that your company offers.

To Benefit You Need To Be Visible In The Search Engines

Being on the first page of a major search engine such as Google can have a dramatic impact on the number of people who visits your website. And remember, all those people are actively looking for a solution to their problem - all that you need to do is persuade them that your solution is the correct one for their problem!

An Optimised Website is the first Step

A service we provide is 'website optimisation' which is commonly understood by most people to be the bulk of work comprising 'SEO'. This is an incomplete understanding of what actually goes into SEO at its optimum.

We frequently find that clients expect SEO to be an inclusive part of our website design package. However, we deliver this as a separate component to our packages since it is not simply the procedure of updating your website's meta tags, which has come to be the common idea. To clarify, meta tags are hidden text elements in the structure of the webpage that are not visible to the user, but which are visible to the Search Engines. These tags mainly consist of the page title (not strictly a meta tag, but very important nonetheless), the meta 'description' tag and that overused, over-abused, but all-important tag, the 'keywords' meta tag. Although this is an intrinsic part of designing and posting a website, it is largely inadequate if one is hoping to have one's website rocket its way up to the top of the charts on Search Engines.

In actuality, the website factors are often the smallest component of the whole SEO/Internet Marketing effort. You may be wondering why that is.

Well, one would need to take a look at the evolution of Search Engines to understand why meta tags were the focus at one point. Previously, in the years BG (before Google), the methods used by Search Engines to analyze any given web page and its importance or relevance in a search were based on the information supplied in the web page's meta tags. The Search Engine would scout around for clues given

by the meta tags and based on the outcome of its gathered information, would place it on the Search Engine Results Pages (also known as 'SERPS'). Now you can imagine how the keyword density contained in any given web page would determine where the webpage would finally be placed on the search results list!

Originally, these tags were supposed to contain the main keywords which would magically shoot your site to the top of Search Engine lists. However, it being the years AG - After Google, this is no longer the case, because once, designers would cram these meta tags with keywords to manipulate the search results, searches would become increasingly meaningless and, more importantly, Google revolutionized the face of Search Engines by evolving new algorithms which circumvent these much-maligned meta tags!

Currently, the most important tag on the page is the Title tag. So apart from that, Google now assigns minor attention to aspects such as keyword density; h1, h2, h3 tags; the actual meta tags, and so on.

As you can now deduce, the way we optimise your website is by assigning unique and well-structured Title Tags, Description and Keyword Meta Tags, ensuring necessary Keyword Density without over- littering it. An over-saturated Keyword Density could result in alarms going off and it being penalized as a spammy site - this we don't want! It's all about crafty balance.

Bear in mind that this is not a step to become pedantic about, but it is still nonetheless an important action which cannot be done without decent Keyword Research, and without which much creative and technical effort is completely wasted and the effectiveness of your website becomes compromised.

Keyword Research is the Key

Keywords are just that - they are KEY to opening your doorway to the world and vice versa! Keyword research is the most crucial aspect of SEO. Incorrectly targeted keywords prevent a pathway into your website and any marketing efforts are laid waste!

What are keywords?

Keywords (or search terms) are the basic words used by people when searching for information or services on the Internet using Search Engines. Let's take the example of someone looking for web design services, the most probable words they will enter into the search engine like Google or MSN are: "web design". The complete term "web design" is then seen as a single 'keyword' (not just the word "web" or the word "design").

People might also type in "web page design". This is a different keyword. As one can imagine, there are millions of keywords! In July 2008 Google served 242 million searches a day  most of which were unique terms.

That being said, it is important to note that keywords, or search terms,

do tend to cluster together. In fact there is a very well-known statistical phenomenon that is popularly known as the 'long tail' that can be applied to the way that Internet searches are performed.

It stands to reason that any keyword needs to be 'targeted' when performing SEO and Internet Marketing. It is unrealistic to expect that your website will perform uniformly well in search engines for all search terms. It is obvious that you could not expect your website to be displayed on the first page of Google if someone searches for the term 'make money' when your site is all about selling wedding dresses, now would you? But in the wedding dress industry, if 'wedding dress' is a keyword that is searched for frequently, and does not have too much competition, then it is a good word to 'target' in SEO actions.

'Targeting' thus forms the crux of effective SEO and Internet Marketing activities, and it is therefore vitally important to understand which keywords are the best ones to target.

Link Building

Another aspect of our SEO and Internet Marketing activities entails greater exposure of your website in Search Engines by improving the reputation of your website through positioning it in such a way that

numerous other sites are linked to it.

This is a way of utilizing the fact that most Search Engines today compute on the basis of the more other sites linked to any website, the higher its reputation must be and thus places it higher in importance on the search result pages (SERPS). With Google this is referred to as PageRank (PR).

The bulk of Internet Marketing energy is focused on Link Building processes which are often quite labour intensive.

Amongst others, these are the Link Building methods we employ:

· Submission to high quality web directories. Please understand that this does NOT consist of submission service to hundreds of thousands of 'search engines' and directories since this is a dangerous activity that can be detrimental to your website health.

· Correctly exchanging links with relevant sites.

· Developing articles that contain useful information designed to direct the reader back to your website.

· Employing Web 2.0 related strategies to in increase your website's exposure to build links.

Keep Your Finger on Website Traffic

Analyzing your Web Traffic Statistics

This can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But in order for you to make full use of this tool, you'll need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies can provide you with a wad of basic web traffic information that is more likely to overwhelm you than enlighten you unless you know how to interpret the data, let alone begin to figure out how to use it to your benefit!

Traffic Volumes

So let's start by examining the most commonly sought after basic data: the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. These figures are the most accurate indication of your website's activity. It is often assumed that the more traffic you see recorded, the better your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You should also consider the behaviour of your visitors once they've actually come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is a broad misconception of what is commonly known as a "hit" and how truly effective and quality traffic to your site is defined. By ‘hits' we simply mean the number of information requests received by the server. If you consider that a single hit on any given page can simply equate to the number of graphics per page (as each image that opens on that page is tallied up as a separate request for that same page), you will get the perspective of how exaggerated the concept of hits can become. Let's say your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in actuality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not the most accurate in analyzing your website traffic.

The greater the traffic is to your website, the more accurate your analysis of overall trends in visitor behaviour will be. The smaller the number of visitors, the greater the chance that a few anomalous visitors will distort the analysis.

How Long Are They Staying

So how do you actually figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors? You'd need to use website traffic statistics to determine how long on average your visitors spend on your site. Relatively brief visits usually indicate an underlying problem. This basic time factor is repeatedly used as the indicator to open the door to more detailed investigation. Following from that is the challenge of figuring out what that problem actually is. It could be a variety of things such as your keywords directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or your graphics being inappropriate, confusing or intimidating, prompting the visitor to exit rapidly. Once you've fixed those problems, continue to use the time indicator as a comparative means to measuring the efficacy of the changes you've made to the website.

Additionally, web traffic stats can assist you in determining how effective or ineffective certain areas are on your website. What you might deem an important page and yet find that visitors are exiting it rapidly, it's obvious that this page needs attention. You could then do various things to improve the link to this page by making the link more noticeable or enticing, or you could simplify the look and layout of the page for ease of navigation or access to the necessary information contained on that page.

On the other hand, you might notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, so you could rearrange the content of that page to include some of your more vital sales and marketing copy to take advantage of this.

How Do They Leave

Your website inevitably has an exit page either in the form of a final order or contact form and the likes. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, it is to be expected that not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so once again, statistics serve to show you the different pages at which point these users exit your site. This is of particular importance when there is an accumulating exit trend from a page that is actually intended to spur on further navigation through your website towards the final sale page that has not yet been viewed as yet. Using these statistics is an effective way of targeting the specific page to unravel the cause of visitor's ejection from the site so that positive modifications can then be made to maintain visitor interest and to increase probability of final sales.

Take Another Look at Those Keywords

Now it's time to focus on your Keywords and phrases. Refer to your analyzed visitor statistics and have a close look and see whether particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. A visitor that is more specifically targeted results in them finding what they are looking for on your site, and even better, end up filling out your contact form or make a purchase. This is what determined the value of these particular Keywords.

But it's also possible that a number of visitors are being misdirected to your site by a particular Keyword or phrase. If so, that Keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are the fulcrum to levering quality self-selected visitors onto your site who are and ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations.

Do you see how these statistics can be used to reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages and visitor habits and motivation? This is essential information to any successful and streamlined Internet marketing campaign.

Company Name

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.