Why promote your website?
Obviously your website is worth nothing without visitors, and when we create a website we routinely submit the site to a number of search engines and specific directories. But these search sites change over time, new search engines appear, old ones get bought over, and submission procedures change - and increasingly cost money. We continually monitor search-engine changes to ensure we give best advice to our clients.
Accepted search engine wisdom says that if you aren't in the first three pages of listings then most people won't find you.
More recently with the rise of social media sites you can have results in the Top 3 of Google within hours if you have a blog set up properly with very little in the way of management fees.
A good example was the launch in September 2008 of the new bunkhouse at Kailzie Gardens near Glentress which achieved a second place listing in Google via the Tweed Valley area blog within 2 hours of the story being posted (it's now dropped out of the top 30 but the main website has picked up 1st and 2nd place listings). And with photo-sharing website Flickr doing increasingly well in search results there are opportunities in the visual area to drive more traffic to your website (here's the Edinburgh Book Festival gallery).
Feedback
“Steve looked at our existing website in terms of key words and page titles and its profile on Google in particular, and we discovered that almost all the site visitors had to have heard of the hotel to find it. We met to discuss key search phrases for the business, and then worked with the content management company to enable us to implement not just the keyword strategy but also Google sitemaps and authentication codes.
“Within 3 months we saw a huge improvement in our rankings, including numbers 1-4 on some of our search terms, coming from nowhere."
Jacob van Houdt, Cringletie Hotel, August 2008
"Steve treated our existing site with respect and very efficiently made it more visible to search engines, with almost instant results."
Nicky, artEscapes, April 2008
How do we know about your site visitors?
All web servers at a professional, or paid for, level store data about visitors to your site - such as which pages they looked at, what country they came from, what browser they use, which search engine they found you with, even what search phrase they used to find you. Even if you can't access site statistics you can now add Google Analytics to the code in your website to record an enormous amount of useful data.
Using site analysis tools customised for your server we can analyse the raw data to provide meaningful information from the raw data but more importantly we know how to use the information to improve your site.
We do this through a variety of processes - as explained below.
What influences a search engine?
Broadly speaking, search engines look for relevance in a site - if your site is well constructed and the key elements (page title, content, image descriptions and META tags) focus on specific topics, then you will appear higher up the listing than other comparable sites.
META tags are hidden code in a site that allow us to provide page descriptions and keywords to search engines - most people will not type in your company name; they will look for a specific service or product (bed and breakfast, company formation, what's on in Edinburgh etc.) and find you by association.
So how can we help you?
When we first construct a site we estimate what people will search for and put these key words into the META tags and other critical elements of the site (e.g. Google ignores META keywords and focuses on page content). What we can then do is review your site performance and appearance on search engines and then modify your site to change or improve your site content to reflect what people are actually searching for.
We can provide a regular monthly tracking service starting with a basic log analysis or a tracking report to establish where your site ranks according to the main search engines. Increasingly, service providers provide access to real time stats on their servers.
From there we offer clients a customised service that might cover regular resubmission (e.g. if you don't tell the search engines when you make changes to your site they don't automatically delete old pages), page rewrites and improved use of META tags. The cost of this depends on what level of support you require.
