What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is an active practice of achieving website visibility on major search engines for keywords searched by your customer prospects. To put it into more practical words - the objective of SEO is to make sure that prospective customers find your website when they are ready to buy.

How can SEO help my business?

Ranking at the top of major search engines ensures that visitors who are looking for your type of products or services find and contact you. Visitors indicate interest in doing business by taking the initiative to search for specific keywords and then click on your website amongst all others. Your company benefits from increase in leads and sales delivered with significant increase in highly targeted visitor traffic.

How Does SEO Work?
Search engines gather information about a website by periodically sending out ´robots´ to scan the site. Scanned information is stored in databases in order to classify and rank a website within subject categories. SEO Expert makes sure that a website contains all of the key ingredients needed by the robots to properly and efficiently gather key information about a website to give it a top rank on the best search engine spots.

What is the Return On Investment - ROI?

Why is my website not on search engines?

Just having a website online is not enough to be found by search engines. All too often owners of websites expect to type in a keyword about their business and expect to see their website up there in the first pages of results. Sadly however it is not that easy Every business owner would like to be #1 in Google for their main keyword. To achieve this you will need to market your website through SEO or through Pay Per Click Advertising. To see if the search engines actually know that your website exists, and have indexed your website type the url (www.yourdomain.co.uk) into the search engine. If they have indexed your website you will probably need to optimise your website to increase visibility across the engines for important keywords. If the search engines have not indexed your website you will need to get indexed- Either manually submit your website to the search engines or build up inbound links that will cause the spiders to come across your website while crawling the web. The Internet, unlike any other media vehicle, can be measured to a fraction of a second. You will be able to track an increase in visitor traffic (as we gain best search engine spots), track volume of new leads and sales delivered with that traffic, and ultimately and easily translate this to your return on investment. The initial ROI from SEO manifests itself through increase sales leads or new customer prospects, and therefore the immediate ROI measurement for most companies is expressed in terms of the cost in generating a sales lead (compared to other media). Initial ROI delivered with our SEO Campaigns can start to kick in within less than one month and sometimes up to three months. Most companies find that the cost in generating a sales lead through SEO is a small fraction from that of any other media.

What is "black hat" and "white hat" SEO?

"White hat SEO" describes methods of optimisation that are approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality. "Black hat SEO" are methods of optimisation such as invisible text or cloaking which ultimately trick the search engines into ranking a website highly. SEO Europe only participate in "white hat" techniques as tricking the search engines can often get a site penalised or even banned from their index completely.

Can SEO companies guarantee top placement in search engines?

The short answer is yes- but often when a SEO company does this they refer to top placement for a keyword that is non-competitive such as a company name. The question should really be Should SEO companies guarantee top placement in search engines?” The answer is no. For instance a business wishing to be ranked top for a keyword such as accommodation should not be promised top placement on the search engines. The reason being:
a) The top ranked website for this keyword has thousands of pages indexed by the search engines and also has hundreds of thousands of inbound links. To compete with this #1 ranked website is virtually impossible, would take years to compete with this and take many, many hours of work and link building.
b) SEO companies have no control over the policies of search engines. To guarantee a top placement is impossible because ultimately the SEO company has no control over how search engines index websites and no control over changes in the search engines algorithms.

How long before I see results from SEO?

The effects of search engine optimisation are certainly not instant. This is due to the nature of how search engines work. If your website is already indexed then the effects of on page optimisation should be seen anywhere between 4-8 weeks. If your site is new or not indexed by the major search engines and directories then the wait can be much longer- for instance some websites will wait up to 18 months to appear in the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org) after submission. And the "Google Sandbox" effect is a filter that Google applies to new domains and prevents new websites from ranking for main keywords. This can last between 1-12 months depending on the competitiveness of the keywords. Off page optimisation such as link building may take up to 3 months before the fruits of the labour are seen.

What is the most used search engine?

Google is the worlds most popular search engine. The UK version of Google is found at www.google.co.uk. Google handles over 300 million searches every day! It also provides results for other search engines Yahoo, AOL, the BBC, iWon and Netscape.

Does every page of my website need to be optimized?

No. Many websites (for instance e-commerce) have hundreds or thousands of pages. These pages are often full of photos and very little content. Sadly these pages will very rarely achieve high rankings, as search engines love content on pages. You should make a selection of web pages that once optimised will increase in search engine positioning. This will be enough to cause other pages to become indexed if they are not already.