Skye Website Services: Web design, improvements and upgrades. Website management, development, training, promotion and
marketing. Specialising in assisting sole traders and small businesses on the Isle of Skye, and the rest of the Highlands
and Islands of Scotland, and other parts of the UK, particularly in remote areas.

Search Engine Optimisation Explained

 

Search engines, such as Google, send out "spiders" which crawl the web, mainly by following links from sites which they already know about. Primarily, they feed on content, particularly text. As a rule, the more (high quality, relevant) text you have on your website the better, because there is more variety of food for the spiders to digest, i.e. a broader range of phrases which people might use in web searches. I can advise you on:

  • What themes it would be helpful to cover
  • What words and phrases you need to emphasise (I can research the best phrases to use in terms of popularity with search engine users, and in terms of low competition from other websites)
  • How to structure the information for both user-friendliness and spider-friendliness
  • How to structure internal and outgoing links
  • The underlying HTML coding (this may require that I write the HTML for you)

The more material you have on your website, the more likely you are going to have other websites link to you. And the more outgoing links you have to other websites, the more "altruistic" your website is judged to be by the search engines.

 

The main problem you are likely to encounter here is, of course, time! It takes time to write pages of good quality relevant text on a wide variety of relevant themes. However, this does not need to be all done at once, unless you are in a hurry to get results, in which case sponsored listings are a better idea as a good interim measure.

 

However, don't let this put you off! Please feel free to contact me and discuss your website with me and I can give you honest, down-to-earth, no-nonsense advice about what you need to do in order to obtain good positions in Google for relevant search terms. It may be that you can achieve good results without too much work.

 

I also offer two different payment methods.

  1. Payment for time spent on the project.
  2. Payment for defined results.

The first option is the cheaper option, and I cannot guarantee results. The second option is a "no-win, no-fee" option, and is more expensive. Here I would define a realistic set of results for specified search terms for a specified minimum position within Google, within a given time period. Payment would be per each specified result.

Sponsored Listings - the Alternative

 

 

Because it can take a long time to write all the material necessary for your website to do well in the "organic" listings, paid-for listings can be more time and cost-effective.

 

Please refer to my page on pay per click advertising.

Tricks of the Trade

 

 

Beware of dodgy tricks used by some search engine optimisation companies. Most of these tricks involve displaying different content to the search engine spiders than to the search engine users. Other tricks involve obscuring exactly what phrases you will be getting "No. 1 results in Google" for, or charging high sums of money for submitting your site to "thousands" of search engines - most of which are too insignificant to mean anything.

 

Such companies often send out unsolicited emails advising you of your current positioning on search engines and how they can improve on them. It is advisable to ignore all unsolicited emails.