// seo
Before the internet, the easiest way for customers to discover your business was through traditional advertising methods - newspaper, television, mail-drop flyers, outdoor billboards, etc.
The cost for this could be quite high and the return could be quite low, depending on a number of factors - many being geographic (i.e. how many shops do you have and are they close to your target audience).
With the advent of the internet, the playing field has been levelled and the costly advertising model can be supplemented considerably by how easily you are found in search engines (called search engine ranking). If a person doesn't know the web address of the site they want, they will invariably go to one of a number of search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo!) to search on a term for the product or service they want (for instance "books about bees").
Optimising your website for search engines is the one of the most effective ways there is to rank well and appear close to the top of the desired results in search engines, thus getting more people to your website.
For quicker results, you can combine an SEO strategy with SEM (search engine marketing) pay per click advertising.
Q: Can you get me to the top of Google?
A: We work on more practical expectations. Instead of getting to the top of Google for a phrase only you would search on, we prefer to get your site more quality visitors, and get those visitors converted to customers. Also, because SEO is not a static endeavour, today's Google top ranked site may be tomorrow's 10th ranked.
Q: Is SEO a one time thing?
A: The search engines are constantly changing the rules of optimisation, meaning the techniques that help today may not tomorrow. This combined with implementing tweaks to ensure you get the results you want means that search engine optimisation is an interative process, best seen as an ongoing process rather than a one-shot deal.
Q: How does SEO work?
A: Search Engine Optimisation is a marketing tool for your website. The flipside to Search Engine Marketing, or pay-per-click, SEO works in two main ways:
1. Onsite optimisation - This is the traditional SEO work, where your pages are optimised for code, page titles, content, keywords and the like. This is very important and quite controllable by the website owner.
2. Link and reputation building - This is the harder, more long-term aspect of SEO which involves generating powerful links back to the site and creating a reputation in your industry as an expert and someone who's site people would want to link to.
A powerful combination of both of these will result in a website that is seen highly by the main search engines.
Q: Will I see results overnight?
A: The nature of most search engines means that SEO results can take some time. Search engines send out what is called a spider to look at the pages of your site at certain intervals. These intervals can be up to three months, meaning any changes can take a while to have their effects felt.
Q: Someone mentioned SERP to me. What is that?
A: SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. Traditionally, each result page holds about 10 results and the average person using a search engine views only the first page. Thus running a successful SEO campaign can sometimes include first page SERP ranking.