• What is Search Engine Optimisation?
• How long does Search Engine Optimisation take?
• What does it cost to have a website optimised?
• What is Pay Per Click and how does it compare with organic optimisation?
• What are the dangers involved in SEO?

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

According to recent results, 694 million people now use the internet. If someone wants to find or buy something, they will often type it into a search engine such as Google, and look for it on the first page of results. What people rarely do is look at the 2nd or 3rd page of the search results and go to the websites listed there.

Search Engine Optimisers work to raise the visibility of their client's websites. They work using a variety of techniques to increase the trust of websites so that when people search for whatever their clients websites are about, they are more likely to go to that website. This method of what is known as 'organic optimisation' is one of the best and most lasting ways of driving relevant 'traffic' (people) to your site.

How long does Search Engine Optimisation take?

Currently it normally takes 3 months to begin to realise results after optimisation work has begun, and normally good solid results are seen at around the 6 month mark. However, the timescale is massively dependant on the age, history, size and current trust levels of the website in questions. For a more accurate estimate of time involved, please feel free to email us the website in question using our contact seo form with the question, "how long will SEO take for my site".

If you are looking in the short term, you may want to think about a Pay Per Click campaign, which will bring instant traffic to your site.

What does it cost to have a website optimised?

The costs can be broadly split into two halves.

Firstly there are all the onsite changes that have to be made. These are permanent changes to the website itself, which once implemented rarely have to be revisited. The changes will entirely depend on the current site set-up, but often include things such as the internal linking structure, changes to the coding of the pages, always involve the title tags and meta data and sometimes include minor changes to the content. We have a fixed fee of £600 for this. We do an annual review of all this for clients at no further cost.

Secondly we would require a budget for the ongoing optimisation campaign. This is monthly amount that is then spent in various ways to raise your ranking. The core of this currently is a very carefully targeted link building campaign that not only builds trust for your site within the internet, but educates the search engines to your website's relevance to the search terms that we want your site to rank for. The budget does not depend on the size of your website; often a nice large site is costs less to rank than one that is too small! The cost will entirely depend on the strength of your competitors, the amount of search terms, and the state of your website. To give you an idea, our current client's budgets range from £200 - £1800 from the smallest to the biggest. A website that is a couple of years old with a medium level of difficulty may cost £350 - £600 a month. Unfortunately, it's not possible to be more specific than that.

For a more accurate estimate of the costs involved, please feel free to email to us the website in question, using our contact seo form with the question, "how much approximately will SEO cost for my site".

What is Pay Per Click and how does it compare with organic optimisation?

Pay Per Click is when you pay a search engine such as Google to have your website appear at the top of the search engines in the brown sponsored link box as below.

The big advantage of this is that it's instant. You can have your site begin appearing to people searching within the engines within half an hour of signing up. How does this work? Very simply. You pick your the terms you would like your site to appear. For example: you sell chocolate. So you might pick "buy chocolate" and each time someone types in "buy chocolate" into Google you would appear in the "sponsored" box. However, you pay for this. Each time someone, anyone, clicks on your link you pay. It does not matter if they buy from you or not, every time they click on a link you pay. The price? It is done by auction, it is a bidding war. If someone offers Google more money than you, they will appear in the box and you won't.

In reality what this means is for a main search term like "buy chocolate" you'll probably be paying £2.50 - £3.00 per click. That means if you have 5% of your website visitors buying from you, you are now paying out between £50 - £60 to Google for each customer you get. For most companies this cannot be sustained, and you only continue appearing in the box for as long as you have money to pay when people click. While you are spending money on it, your profits are being given to Google, and as soon as your budget runs out, you disappear and are replaced by a competitor.

Organic optimisation is not instant like pay per click. It takes a minimum of 3 months to appear in high in the search engines. However you do not pay every time someone clicks on your link. This means you can sustain a high volume of customers coming to you at a very low cost once you are ranked well. I'm repeating this again because it is key, it is far more economical and effective to optimise organically, but will take 3 months for you to rank. (more information above under 'How long does search engine optimisation take?')

The ideal is to do both. When targeted well, pay for click can yield good results and be very profitable. Also whilst optimising to appear organically, it can bring the customers that you are looking for. As you begin to rank well, you can then reduce your spending in pay for click whilst still getting customers, thus maximising your profits.

What are the dangers involved in SEO?

As with working in any field, if you hire someone who isn't interested in doing a good job and simply wants your money, you can end cheated of your money. With engine optimisation, you can also finish in a worse position than you started. Please note, there are many legitimate search engine optimisers like us who operate in the best interests of our clients, the following examples occur by the hand of the well intentioned but inexperienced and ill informed on the subject, or the outright thieves. The biggest worry to any website is being removed from the search engines index. This is the worst thing that can happen, and means that when people are searching you will NEVER appear for any search term, not even your own name.

In 2006, Google heavily penalised the BMW website for breaching their regulations by using 'doorway pages' inappropriately, BMW's financial loss from this was considerable. This kind of thing will only happen if you use clearly defined forbidden techniques in order to appear high up in the search rankings. There are a number of things that can affect your ranking negatively, for example placing an outgoing link on your page to a site that becomes flagged up as untrustworthy. A good optimiser won't do this. There are countless techniques that can be used both completely legitimately and well to help a websites visibility, and be used in ways that whilst increase ranking dramatically, if caught being used will be penalised. You are paying your optimiser for his skill and knowledge in using these techniques, and as long he uses them wisely you will benefit. If he/she 'cheats' as google sees it and is caught, it will result in your website being penalised.