Search Engine Optimisation - F.A.Q

Search engine optimisation is a means of web site promotion that reverses traditional marketing methods.

With traditional marketing, you would target your promotion to reach as much of your potential market or audience as possible. Search engine optimisation is the opposite.

SEO attempts to capture an audience that is already looking for your product or service by achieving a high ranking in search engines and directories. This often means a very high return on your investment.

There is no one answer to this as individual engines rank according to different criteria. Some - like Google - emphasise link popularity (that is: the number of relevant links pointing to a particular page), while others stress the use of keywords on the page or the overall theme of a site. Simply put, however, all search engines are looking to produce results that most accurately match the term(s) entered by a searcher.

Search engines use programs (called spiders) to gather (crawl) the information on your web pages. This spider will look at things like the Title of a page, the description, Heading tags, file names and the main page text in order to help determine what the page is about.

Each search engine uses a different algorithm to determine the relevance of one page over another.

Search engine optimisation is a long term process. While it is possible to get good results within days (and we should know - we've done it !), the time taken to achieve solid, long term results can vary considerably.

Determining factors include the competitiveness of your field, whether your site is brand new or well established and whether you have a sufficiently high number of good incoming links.

No. Changing the meta tags alone is not going to do much to get you a good placement in most of the major search engines.

Pay Per Click advertising are those 'sponsored' text ads you see at the top and the right hand side of Google, Yahoo and so on.

Advertisers bid against each other for their ads to appear under keyphrases they have chosen. The advertiser pays for each click through to their site.

1 Design 4 Life reserves the right to refuse any potential client. In practice, this means we will not promote anything that breaks UK law.

No. We do not use programs like AddWeb or SubmitWolf or any automated optimisation and positioning software. We feel that such programs have no place in search engine marketing.