Get your site appearing on Google, Yahoo and Bing!
A good and proven Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company can certainly help you achieve this, but what's involved in optimising a website?
From our point of view we always try to make sure that all the website's we design are optimised from day one.
The current results of SEO for our own site and a few of the sites we have developed have produced the following results.
Page positions last checked 3 November 2009 using the major UK Search Engines (these results exclude Pay Per Click advertisements.)
| Achieved Page Positions | Search Engines |
Search Terms Used |
Site & Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| g2, y1 ,b1 | Google UK, Yahoo, Bing | free pc help, |
QBS PC Help Free PC Help online and PC Repairs in Coleraine, NI. |
| g1, y1, b1 | Google UK, Yahoo, Bing | promotion at work, |
Job guides and articles for young people. |
| g1, y1, b1 | Google, Yahoo, Bing | buy golf buggy ireland, |
Selling Golf Buggies and Trolleys. |
| g1, y1, b1 | Google, Yahoo, Bing | mobility products ireland, mobility scooters ireland. |
Selling a wide range of mobility products. |
| g1, y1, b1 | Google, Yahoo, Bing | nourishing night treatment, radiant skin moisturiser, perfect eyes anti aging eye cream. |
Selling a range of natural and organic beauty products. |
To achieve these sort of results, which can get a website on one of the first 3 pages of all the major search engines, can take quite a long time, so never expect instant results when you employ an SEO company.
Typically a SEO company will provide some or all of the following services:
Keyword Analysis – this involves the optimisation of your web pages for the phrases that deliver quality traffic online for your particular website.
'Targeted key phrases' are phrases that people type into the search engines when searching for your type of product or service. This means it is generally better for you to select a list of specific key phrases rather than generic ones. The more specific the key phrase is, the less competition your website will be up against.
Web Page Design & Layout - a possible redesign of your website pages and even a new domain name may sometimes be required. Generally speaking, you cannot start to design a search engine friendly website unless you have a search engine optimisation strategy in place beforehand.
Additional Page Creation - new pages may be needed such as a site map, blog, forum or links page(s).
Amending Existing Pages - existing pages may also need to be optimised so that they can include target words and key phrases to help you to get good listings in all the major UK and/or World search engines.
Site Updates - regular updates to your website content helps with search engine promotion and positioning. This could involve you in preparing a regular flow of new and interesting articles and even weekly posts for a blog.
Internal & External Linking - using key words and phrases in internal and external links is another thing to implement if you want your search engine optimisation to be successful.
Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model where you only pay if a user actually clicks on an advert to visit your website. This will usually be a text based advert.
This form of advertising can bring fairly quick results and there are many companies offering this service (just try searching Google for 'Pay Per Click Campaigns). Many SEO companies include this 'Pay Per Click adverting as part of their overall package.
How it works
Advertisers bid on keywords or phrases they predict their target market will use as 'search terms' when they are looking for a product or service on the Internet. When a user types a keyword query that matches the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These Pay Per Click ads are called a 'Sponsored link' or 'Sponsored ads' and generally appear next to or above the natural or 'organic' results on search engine results pages.
Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter were the largest network operators in 2008. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at £0.01 (up to £0.15), these prices are often referred to as Costs Per Click (CPC). Be warned - very popular search terms can cost a lot more if you use the most popular search engines.
To find out more about this type of advertising please see our article - "Pay Per Click Advertising Tips".
Because of the high position of our own website we are often asked if we provide SEO services. Presently we only offer these services to our web design customers as part of the design process. If asked, we do continue to optimise our customers website's and that is why most of them enjoy good positioning across all the major search engines.
So what price should you expect to pay for professional Search Engine Optimisation from a company that specialises in this type of work.
Only a handful of SEO companies quote prices on their websites and many say they cannot quote a price because of the amount of SEO work that might be needed for one site may not be needed for the next site e.g. one site may have to be completely redesigned to make it search engine friendly whereas the next could be well designed to start with (XHTML and CSS) and just needs a few extra pages optimised and a few added.
The following should give you an indication of likely costs you will incur. Bear in mind that SEO work is long term so many companies charge for a full twelve months. Some will ask you to pay up front for the whole twelve months whereas others will let you pay monthly or quarterly.
Annual SEO charges for static websites |
||
Low |
Medium |
High |
£720 (£60pm) |
£1,200 (£100pm) |
£1,800 (£150pm) |
Annual SEO charges for e-commerce websites |
||
Low |
Medium |
High |
£1,440 (£120pm) |
£2,400 (£200pm) |
£3,600 (£300pm) |
Good SEO companies never promise immediate results or guarantee number 1 positions in the major search engines.
In fact, initial results may well take up to four months or more to start appearing in the search engines!
As your competitors are also trying to get high rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing your websites page position may change as the weeks and months go by, no matter which SEO company you buy into.
QBS PC Help do not recommend any particular SEO company as we believe in letting our readers decide for themselves about the company they wish to use (a simple search "seo companies UK" using Google will reveal many UK sites offering SEO services).
Get a free ebook - 'Successful Search Engine Marketing'
