Search engine optimisation uk & promotion. Get to the top with specialist advice on search engine submission and SEO marketing in the UK

There's no doubt that, done properly, optimisation and professional promotion can send volumes of traffic to your site. It's up to you to capitalise on it. After all, if no one can find it, it won't work - ever!

There is a whole lot of guff talked about search engine optimisation and promotion, lots of 'too good to be true' deals. "Let us register your site with 3000 search engines", how many times have you seen that? If you don't want to throw your money away on dodgy promotions, read on....

Search Engines and Directories

Once you have a Website design company build your site, you must help people to find it. The internet is like a library, but the books are in no order and someone's turned the light off. How can you find what you want? This is where search engines come in. They catalogue the library and deliver relevant topics when asked. There are over 6 billion pages on the Web. That's SIX BILLION - or one for nearly every person on the planet today. Search engines and directories are the means that people use to find what they're looking for. They scour their index for sites that mention the keywords (the topics) that have been typed in, and display the results.

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Types of Search Engine

There are two different types of Search Engine. To put it simply, they are Directories (like Yahoo) and Search Engines like AltaVista or Google.The directories are compiled by humans and split their subjects into categories whilst the search engines 'crawl' the web and index what they find. In either case, you need to tell it where to find your site in the first place - this is called Search Engine Submission.

Search Engine Submission

For a site to be successful, it must be listed with the Search Engines. It must also use wording that will show up well in searches. Building a search engine friendly website is an art in itself. This rather arcane art is called Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation

Employ a Search Engine Optimiser, a specialist who makes sure that the relevant words and phrases appear in the best positions on the pages. There are many other considerations, complicated by the engines modifying their preferences on a monthly basis. The trick is knowledge and experience. Part of the effort is to research what people are looking up. We pay for access to a database listing over 350 million searches carried out over the last eight weeks. That way, we make sure that we are constructing the page in such a way that people will find it. There are those who try to fool search engines. If they are detected, the site will probably be penalised, either shifted down the rankings or, in many cases, removed from their listings completely. And it's worth noting, search engines all use different means to look for sites. Most read the text on the page. That's one reason you found this page. Some use meta tags although most now ignore these. Some use the description tag and some even use what is called 'alt text', the text you see when your cursor is over an image on a page. Oh, and don't forget relevant links in from related sites. Many don't like frames and dynamic pages. They can't follow the links properly so don't index frames and dynamic sites deeply.The rules are constantly changing - which is why we work full-time on them.

What sort of site can be promoted in the search engines?

Well the short answer is almost any, there are some types of programming language that search engines have trouble reading and there are some practices that make it harder for a search engine spider to follow, these should be avoided, but with so many different subjects being discussed on the internet from the health and safety issues involved with pat testing and electrical appliance testing to information and help in organising guided tours of India, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

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High ranking on search engines

Apart from the conventional site optimisation techniques, there are various ways of getting your site to show up well on search engines.Hook pages (NOT doorway pages) can be a good idea. They are pages related to your site through a topic, rather than the main subject - Rockbase, the definitive music database, has a 'UK Radio Station' list which introduces potential customers.A recent development has been for many search engines - especially the major ones - to insist on paid submissions.  A word of caution though, some are more effective than others! We know which ones are worth paying for.Search engines get their content and results from several sources, Inktomi provides information to 126 different engines, like MSN; AOL and Yahoo use Google information and many add in results from Overture. This is the tip of the iceberg. It's part of my work as a Search Engine Optimiser to know about these links and to exploit them for the benefit of my customers.

Staying at the Top

It's all too easy to relax when you're high but if you do, you are likely to fall. If you believe that the work is done once the summit is in site, there are plenty of others eager to knock you off the pinnacle. We offer a Ranking monitoring and Position Maintenance service to make sure all the hard work of the climb is not lost.

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Great deals?

You may see adverts from people offering what look to be great deals. "We'll submit your site to 3000 search engines for $49.95!!" Why is that a bad deal?

For starters, there aren't 3000, or even 300, search engines that are worth submitting to. The top six search engines get 95 percent of the hits. Time is much better spent figuring out how to maximise your results in the important search engines and in specialised directories. The cheapies aren't going to do that for $49.95. In fact, all they're going to do is to plug your URL into an automated program that submits it to a bevy of search engines and 'link farms' with the click of a button. However, search engine submissions do not always take on the first attempt, and many engines deliberately exclude automated submissions. So your $49.95 is gone, and your site will see no benefit. 

I could do that for a tenner, so if you're still tempted....I used automated submission software when it worked, but things have moved on. Many search engines now discriminate against this type of software so I submit manually to selected engines & directories.

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Real world Search Engine Optimisation

Pick up the phone and call Cravenplan now!
01747 858001 - 9am-5pm GMT
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Email the Search Engine Consultant