There's absolutely no point in being all dressed up with nowhere to go! This is the trap that many websites fall into - after hours of work and money that has been spent on them, these sites find themselves floating aimlessly in cyberspace.

If you want your site to work for you and shorten your payback period, then you cannot ignore the much maligned search engine. There are over 200 million registered web site addresses out there with the top 5 search engines undertaking around 868 searches per second and these statistics are constantly increasing!

Unfortunately, search engine registration is not a simple process because the term "search engine" has been used to cover a multitude of different vehicles. A true search engine, like HotBot, creates its lists automatically sending out 'spiders' to identify both new sites and changes to existing ones.

This means that updating your site has implications on how the search engine ranks it. Directories, on the other hand, are compiled manually and rely on people submitting their sites to them. Generally, your site ranking won't change if the site is updated. Then there are the hybrids which are a combination of the two.

The type of vehicle listing your site will be analysing it within different constraints. Amongst other things a search engine will look at the page copy, title and any changes therein whilst a directory may list the site if it has superior content to its competitor or looks "prettier". Search engines also look at the number of times a keyword may appear on a page and then rank the site accordingly. Sometimes, it's just a game of luck and chance.

However, we are here to improve those odds and have tried and tested means of doing this…

Gold Service

To start with we will construct your site in a manner suitable for search engine spiders to assess it. We'll ensure that keywords are repeated to increase the chances of a listing (whilst avoiding spamming); we'll use content-relevant headlines, text based navigation, accurate meta tags, links to other useful/complimentary sites and URL's where possible. These all improve the site's ranking with the search engines.

We'll also design the site so that it's user-friendly, is highly navigable, aesthetically pleasing and allows the user to find the information they require in the least number of clicks. This will improve the site's ranking with the directories. If we are designing and programming your site from scratch, this service is included in the package. We'll then register your site with the top 10 search engines/directories and would recommend that we re-register on your behalf every 6-8 weeks.

Platinum Service

This includes each component of the gold service but takes the process further enabling you to pick and choose from various additional services. It is ideal for those people who are happy with their existing site but want to take advantage of our Search Engine Optimisation service and also for those existing customers of ours who want to optimise their ranking within the search engine listings. You can choose from the following services:

• We can undertake a competitor analysis on your behalf to analyse your competitor's sites. This establishes your target user's current experience and provides a benchmark against which your site must exceed.
• We can undertake extensive keyword research on your behalf to optimise your chances.
• We can submit your site on a monthly basis to 1500 engines/directories and monitor and record the submission progress.
• We can create Internal Content Pages for your site.
• We can provide comprehensive web traffic statistics giving you detailed and accurate data about your site visitors. This is over and above the traffic information freely available within your hosting package.

Search engine submission and optimisation is a very powerful tool. To further increase your number of hits, we recommend that you undertake some form of website promotion and we would be happy to come up with some ideas for you on this.