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Quick and Cheap Search Engine Optimisation is a myth. Here's a quick guide to help you assess our costs, methods and competance
If you want to know more, each main point is linked to a more thorough explanation further down the page.
- If you don't know what search engine optimisation is: An explanantion
More art and craft than science, search engine optimisation aims to push your website as high up all search engine results pages as possible in reponse to as many search queries as possible.
- Guide to our search engine optimisation costs
A big website will cost £300 to assess, small to medium will be £150
We charge £150 for a half day report or £300 for a full day. If you just wanted to jump in and skip the report, it would cost between £1000 to £3000 as a once off fee and £100 to £300 per month for maintenance and development. Click link above for further explanation.
- There are hundreds of search engines, do I need to submit my website to them all?
No, just a few will do.
- Why SEO ( an acronym for search engine optimisation ) is NOT easy, quick or cheap
- Search engine optimisation, it's easy to be cheated, how to avoid SEO cons
- Is it worth spending a lot of money on search engine optimisation, what's the future
Rosy, I think. I stopped advertising in Yellow Pages years ago. I now market exclusively through the web. I used to spend £5000 to £10,000 a year, every year, get indifferent results, now its a one off search engine optimisation cost, plus annual maintenance etc, I now sell a lot more.
- Are there legitimate tricks to search engine optimisation
Yes certainly, it's just a matter of knowing how far you can optimize for search engines before being black listed.
- 1st example of high page ranking through search engine optimisation
Real statistics from a brewery website
- 2nd example of high page ranking through search engine optimisation
Real statistics from an insurance intermediary
- 3rd example of high page ranking through search engine optimisation
Real statistics from a graphic design company
- 4th example of high page ranking through search engine optimisation
Real statistics from a sign company
- You want to be on the first page of search engine results, can it be done?
- Typical search term used in search engine optimisation
- How long to achieve results through search engine optimisation
- Does anybody know how to achieve the best search engine optimisation results
Emphatically NO. Anybody who says that they do is lying, it's as simple as that, but you can have a very good idea based on experience but search engine optimisation is a somewhat arcane art.
- To optimise my website for search engines, will it involve re-design
Almost certainly yes. At least to some degree. That's not how it looks so much but how it functions.
- What is a search engine optimisation assesment report
It analyzes why your website is where it is at the moment and gives a plan of action for search engine optimisation, the costs spread over time, probably 12 months.
- What we need from you to promote your website through search engine optimisation
To start with every bit of company literarure that you've got, images and text. Followed by a stream of consciousness A4 page of your ambitions and direction, your dreams in short. Next, at least a half hours conversation and preferably a personal meeting, which will probably be about three hours.
- Why trust us with your website promotion?
Talk to us and trust your instincts
- Any recompense or money back guarantee if we fail to promote your website through search engine optimisation
No. Results can't be guaranteed. The search engines keep moving the goal posts to make it awkward. I can only say this, I haven't failed yet. Ideally we can meet and you then have to go on your gut instincts, but I'm certain no one will try harder on your behalf.
- Could I promote my own website through search engine optimisation
YES, but be prepared for a steep learning curve and many disappointments. Try oyster-web.co.uk for a good halfway house between how we do it and DIY route. They charge for a report that tells you how to promote your website DIY. ( Our companies are not linked in any way, it's just that they appear very competant, reasonably priced and do produce good results.
- Why spell optimisation with a S, not an Z; optimization
UK 20 somethings probably use a Z, 30 plus use an S. Both spellings are legitimate. Z is the American way of spelling.
- Search engine results explained
7 million results, where does that put my web site, can search engine optimisation really work, just how much competition is there?
We design, produce, maintain and promote websites and the truth is, there is no easy way of promoting your website. It's a
long, hard slog, there is no special method exclusive to anyone, or a secret way that no one else knows in order to win good
search engine results, there is only meticulous preparation and attention to detail within each web page, intuitive guile and craft learnt from experience. Anyone who tells you that they can get your website into the top ten of search engine rankings, quickly,
cheaply and permanently, is giving you marketing hype, bullshit or downright lies.
If you can accept that, then read on and we
will tell you what you have to do to get search engine results. If you want a quick fix you'd best look somewhere else, but they will
be lying and telling you what you want to hear, we'll give you the truth, the facts and real time examples below about search engine
optimisation, often referred to by the acronym; SEO.
If you're really serious about getting your website to the top of all search engine rankings, stick with us, give it 3 to 6 months
minimum and get big feedback within a year, hit bigtime in 18 months.
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Proven Search Engine ResultsNow we'll start to prove we get results. The image to your left is a screen shot of a website we designed, built and promote known as 'breconshirebrewery.com'. This site has been live for about one year and is top for many search terms. Copy and paste the line below into Google or Yahoo and the Breconshire Brewery website should turn up in first page. The brewery makes and sells traditional draught ales, so try that phrase as a search term.
traditional draught ales
Just copy and paste it into your favourite search engine, Breconshire Brewery should be right up there.
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If you can't be bothered to search, these are the results in Yahoo and Google on 2nd November 2004
for the search term 'traditional draught ales'
- Google - World search - 9,580 results - position = 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
- Google - UK only search - 6,490 results - position = 1st, 2nd
- Yahoo - World search - 11,100 results - position = 1st
- Yahoo - UK only search - 6,490 results - position = 1st, 2nd
- Ask Jeeves - World search - 5,100 results - position = 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
- All The Web - World search - 10,900 results - position = 1st
- AltaVista - World search - 11.300 results - position = 1st
- AOL.search - UK search - 6,480 results - position = 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
Now try taking away the word traditional, the number of results goes up to thirty thousand ish, but the brewery still ranks high.
Take away the word draught and we plummet down the results, this where the long term work starts. You can't emphaseise everthing on one page so the plan is to change the emphasis to treaditional and diminish the importance of the word draught. Each page can be sculpted to respond to different search terms. We will achieve the search engine result. it's just a matter of time.
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We're happy to haggle, so we're flexible when it comes to what we charge for search engine optimisation. Websites vary so much that each website is starting from a different place. Some websites will need a vast amount of work, some just sophisticated tinkering, so to give you a guide I'll repeat the costs for search engine optimisation mentioned at the top of the page
A big website will cost £300 to assess, small to medium will be £150, but first we'll have a look at it for nothing and talk to you on the phone or in person if you want to call in.
We charge £150 for a half day report or £300 for a full day. The idea of the report is to give you and us an in depth understanding of what needs to be done if you want to achieve long term high page rankings through search engine optimisation.
If you just wanted to jump in and skip the report, it would cost between £500 to £3000 as a once off fee and £100 to £300 per month for maintenance, development and continuous search engine tinkering.
Done properly, search engine optimisation really works.
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Examples - real search engine optimisation results
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Search terms used:
champion beer of wales
champion welsh beer
golden valley beer |
Search Engine optimisation Results
- Google - World search - search term = 'champion beer of wales' - 29,500 results - position = 3rd, 4th
- Google - World search - search term = 'champion welsh beer' - 17,500 results - position = 5th, 6th
Search results from using the phrase 'golden valley beer'
- Google - World search - 205,000 results - position = 8th, 9th
- Yahoo - World search - 70,700 results - position = 13th
Golden Valley, a Welsh beer recently won a major CAMRA award in Wales
- Yahoo - World search - search term = 'great welsh beers' - 40,800 results - position = 9th
- Yahoo - World search - search term = 'ales beers wales' - 23,200 results - position = 1st
- Google - World search - search term = 'ales beers wales' - 14,500 results - position = 1st, 2nd
- Yahoo - World search - search term = 'suppliers ales beers' - 37,500 results - position = 3rd
- Yahoo - World search - search term = 'brewers ales beers' - 55,700 results - position = 2nd
- Google - World search - search term = 'brewers ales beers' - 28,300 results - position = 16th
Search results from using the phrase 'golden valley beer'
- Google - World search - 205,000 results - position = 9th, 10th
- Yahoo - World search - 70,700 results - position = 13th
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Search Engine Results
- Google - World search - 15,900 results - position = 5th, 6th
- Search results using 'golden valley beer'
- Google - World search - 205,000 results - position = 9th, 10th
- Yahoo - World search - 70,700 results - position = 13th
Golden Valley beer recently won a major accolade
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Website Promotion Solutions - Beating the Competition
Datahealth are in the highly competitive field of private medical insurance
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Search term used:
freedom private medical insurance
family private medical insurance
personal healthcare insurance
company medical insurance
private medical insurance expats
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- Yahoo - World search for - freedom private medical insurance - 693,000 results - position = 1st, 8th
- Yahoo - World search for - family private medical insurance - 2,060,000 results - position = 8th, 15th
- Yahoo - UK search for - personal healthcare insurance - 130,000 results - position = 3rd, 9th
- Yahoo - World search for - personal medical insurance - 7,170,000 results - position = 25th, 45th
- Yahoo - UK search for - personal medical insurance - 502,000 results - position = 5th, 10th
- Yahoo - World search for - company medical insurance - 7,270,000 results - position = 48th
- Yahoo - UK search for - company medical insurance - 501,000 results - position = 8th
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It's not cheap, easy or quick to achieve high search engine rankings through search engine optimisation. You can't buy a high position. Google is almost the moral custodian of search engine rankings. Google gives guidance on how to achieve good search engine results with search engine optimisation in general but doesn't tell you, or me everything. When Google or Yahoo ranks a page it considers maybe a hundred different aspects and each aspect gains your website some points, Google also regularly changes its ranking assessment criteria, so just when you thought you'd got search engine optimisation cracked, the goal posts shift and you drop down the rankings. This keeps people like me on their toes and prevents anybody cornering the 'How to Rank High with Google Market'.
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Interpreting Search Engine Results
The reason we get results of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th is because we have 2 websites for most customers, a dot com version and a dot co dot uk version. Its expensive to produce and maintain but dot com results don't always show up in results for UK only searches. If your business sells mostly to the UK, people will search UK only. They don't want plumbers or graphic designers based in LA so they localise their search. Your dot com site probably won't show up in your potential customers UK only search
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Why websites may need a re-design to gain search engine rankings
This is an example of a website with poor SEO ( search engine optimisation )
Search term used:
freedom private medical insurance
family private medical insurance
personal healthcare insurance
company medical insurance
private medical insurance expats
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Search Engine Resultsprivate medical healthcare insurance
- Google - UK search for - private medical insurance - 440,000 results - position = Not in top 500
- Google - UK search for - private medical healthcare insuranc - 122,000 results - position = Not in top 500
- Google - UK search for - freedom private medical insurance - 32,400 results - position = 119th
- Google - UK search for - family private medical insurance - 151,000 results - position = Not in top 500
- Google - UK search for - personal healthcare insurance - 183,000 results - position = 230th
- Google - UK search for - personal medical insurance - 510,00 results - position = Not in top 500
- Google - UK search for - company medical insurance - 638,000 results - position = Not in top 500
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You've probably witnessed Supermarkets destroying the High Street, so here is a way of striking back at the supermarket and multi-national conglomerate. It's better than Yellow Pages, which was great once but is now on its way out. The World Wide Web is growing, get ahead of the game now while services like ours are cheap. The dot com boom happened and went bang, but the internet revolution is still happening. More and more people are using the internet to find products and services that are a bit special. If it's not something you find in the supermarket, they look in Yellow Pages, well they used to. Now they'll surf the net. In another ten years everyone will. I think it's best to get ahead of the game now. It's still early days!
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We've included results here from search engines where we've come absolutely nowhere.
The reason we're doing this is to demonstrate that we're not hiding the truth and to illustrate a typical problem. In this case Google is completely ignoring this website and we can't work out why.
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Search term used:
graphic designers london |
Search Engine Results
- Yahoo - World search - 309,000 results - position = 4th
- Yahoo - UK only search - 107,000 results - position = 3rd
- AltaVista - World search - 315,000 results - position = 3rd
- Lycos - World search - 220,000 results - position = 3rd
- All The Web - World search - 263,000 results - position = 4th
- Google - World search - 268,000 results - position = Nowhere
- Ask Jeeves - World search - 49,000 results - position = Nowhere
- AOL.search - UK search - 183,000 results - position = Nowhere
I've included negative search engine results here to demonstrate that it's not always easy to get listed or indexed by a search engine. As a rule of thumb, we find that if a website is getting good search engine results in Google, it will be doing better in Yahoo, but something always bucks the trend.
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Website Promotion Solutions
This web site page is part of the Breconshire Brewery website, it's a subpage 3 levels within the website and relates to one of the pubs owned by the brewery. The Bull's Head is rare in that it caters for vegans and vegetarians as if they were not a sub species, they offer accommodation and is in a popular tourist locality. Using the search term below we get a good search engine ranking.
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It's hard to get good search engine results using just one word but if it's in an area that's not too competitive, it's well worth a try. |
Try the search term below in Google
signwriters
signmakers-brighton.co.uk achieves the search engine rankings listed below.
As you can see, we have work to do to improve the ranking with Yahoo.
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Search Engine Results for signwriters
- Google - World search - 25,000 results - position = 4th
- Google - UK only search - 11,000 results - position = 2nd
- Yahoo - World search - 20,030 results - position = 43rd
- Yahoo - UK only search - 4.090 results - position = 14th
- Ask Jeeves - World search - 49,000 results - position = 18th
- AOL.search - UK search - 15,300 results - position = 5th
If a website achieves a high search engine ranking in Google, it generally follows that it will be doing as well or better in Yahoo, this is not the case here. Yahoo takes longer than Google to go through the process of indexing web pages and displaying the results. So this website should improve its position over the next 3 months. Yahoo seems to give a lot of value to time served web pages. Strangely, poorly promoted web pages that have been around for a very long seem to do quite well and achieve a sort of honourary search engine ranking.
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Risking It - Don't Cheat - Website Promotion Solutions
You can cheat at search engine optimisation but you'll get caught and banned. If you want a short term burn, then explode and go under, then go the dodgy way, but we don't do that work. If you want long term success on the web you need white hat search engine optimisation services.
Black Hats and Grey Hats are the baddies and not so bad baddies of the search engine optimisation world.
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Search term used:
brighton designers |
- Yahoo - World search - 138,000 results - position = 2nd, 3rd
- Yahoo - UK only search - 57,600 results - position = 1st
- Altavista - World search - 142,000 results - position = 2nd
- AOL.search - UK search - 67,100 results - position = 4th
- Ask Jeeves - World search - 72,600 results - position = 6th, 7th
- Google - World search - 104,000 results - position = 24th
- Google - UK only search - 33,600 results - position = 14th
Clearly we know that we have work to do to improve this position in Google, again, this a long term process.
It's very rare to jump straight into the top ten.
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Website Promotion Solutions and Answers
Through search engine optimisation you can target your website locally, UK only or worldwide
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Search term used:
mural artists brighton
- Yahoo - World search - 2.280 results - position = 1st
- Google - World search - 25,000 results - position = 4th, 5th, 10th, 11th
decorative artists brighton
- Yahoo - World search - 14.200 results - position = 1st, 5th
- Google - World search - 25,000 results - position = 23rd, 24th
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It's not just your home page that counts, many sub-pages deep within your website can obtain high search engine rankings for different spects of your services or individual products. You can also target local markets, a central heating engineer based in Newcastle may not want enquiries from London and vice versa.
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- Number 1 and most important, ask them, though they may not tell you the truth. Do you use tiny text or hidden text or bombard the page with repetitive text. The old trick that used to work of white text on a white background, so humans couldn't see it but search engines could, will work for a short time, you may soar up the rankings but come back down in flames a few months later
- When you say that through your search engine optimisation you'll get my website into the first pages of all the major search engines, which search engines do you mean
- When you say submit to thousands of search engines, do I need to be listed in thousands of search engines.
The thing to remember here is that most search engines will automatically include you as long as you're in the main ones, Yahoo and Google. Above all the most important place of all to be listed is in DMOZ, The Open Directory Project.
This is always our first step in search engine optimisation and it is like gold. If you're in DMOZ, you're half way there. Mention DMOZ to most search engine optimisation practitioners and you'll probably hear a groan or silence.
It could take a year to be included but more likely 3 to 6 months.
- When you say that through search engine optimisation I'll be high in the search engine rankings, for how long, where will I be in 18 months time?
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This web site page is part of the Breconshire Brewery website, it's a subpage 3 levels within the website and relates to one of the pubs owned by the brewery. The Bull's Head is rare in that it caters for vegans and vegetarians as if they were not a sub species, they offer accommodation and is in a popular tourist locality. Using the search term below we get a good search engine ranking. |
Search term used:
vegan accommodation wales |
Search Engine Results
- Google - World search - 8,250 results - position = 5th
- AOL.search - World search - 5,310 results - position = 5th
This is a new page and things take a long time to show up in Yahoo, give it until Christmas.
A lot of search engines borrow or buy search engine results from the likes of Google and Yahoo. There are thousands of search engines, most of them are unheard of and virtually unused by the public. AOL gets most of its search engine results from Google, so if you're doing well in Google, they'll pass you on to many other search engines free of charge and effort.
Many search engines will charge you to be listed within their search engine, play your cards right and you'll get in for free.
Optimisation or Optimization
I'm sticking with optimiSation but on another website we spell optimisation with a Z. You could blame it on the Americanization of Europe but unfair I think, the internetization of the world is the real culprit.UK 20 somethings probably use a Z, 30 plus use an S. Both spellings are legitimate. Z is the American way of spelling.
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It's a headache, if it was easy everybody would be number one or, at least, on the first page. Search engine optimisation is a craft, not a science. It's as imprecise as philosophy which may or may not be right, however, search engine optimisation requires technical knowledge to enact it, not a lot though. If you sat down to learn search engine optimisation, you'd know a lot in 6 months, within 2 or 3 years you'd be confident enough to sell search engine optimisation services. Notice how the phrase 'search engine optimisation' crops up a lot. This is known as keyword density and is substantially important to search engine optimisation and website promotion. This page sells search engine optimisation services, so repeating the phrase 'search engine optimisation' is important in obtaining high search engine page ranking. I've over emphasised the use of the phrase 'search engine optimisation' to demonstrate a point. To achieve high search engine rankings through search engine optimisation, you have to use the keywords that someone may search with a lot in order to increase the relevancy of the website page to the surfer, your potential customer. Lots of words on the page dilute the effectiveness of your keywords or phrase. To avoid repetitiion and bland copywriting is a trick easy enough to do copywriting for print, you can say anything and only the reader will penalise you, with search engines it's different. The search engine may well penalise you for repeating a word too often or not often enough. I boldened the words a lot just above for a reason. I would have preferred to use the word 'frequently', but aware that it hasn't been used on this page until now I avoided its use because search engines generally ignore simple one, two or three letter words and a they do not dilute the content or relevancy of other words on the page. Similarly by using the word 'lot', which I have used before. I can avoid introducing a new word to the page and furrther diluting the percentage of relevant keywords. The relevant keywords that your potential customers are searching with.
Before writing the paragraph above, this page had a keyword density for the 3 word phrase search engine optimisation of 6.74%, which is quite low for some search engines. The paragraph may have diluted it down to 5%, making this page an almost certain also ran in the search engine optimisation field.
Good news, I just checked and the keyword density for the phrase on this page 'search engine optimisation' has increased to 8.27%.
By writing that simple paragraph the keyword density for the search term 'search engine optimisation' increased to 8.38%. This is an example of what this game is like. Search engine optimisation involves both selling to the public ( not too obviously repetitive ) and to search engines ( repetitive enough but not so much as to be accused of spamming), it's a delicate balancing act. Too much repetition will get you banned, just enough will help get you to the top of search engine rankings.
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Search Engine Optimisation - SEO - Website Promotion - Brighton London Wales
Search engine optimisation and website promotion. Our results speak for themselves, check us out. Based in Brighton, serving UK and the world
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