Call us on : 020 7118 1001

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is SEO?

SEO is the science (or art, depending on your point of view) of streamlining a website so that it performs to its optimum in the search engines. It differs slightly from website marketing, although the two are very closely linked. The ultimate aim of SEO is to ensure that people using search engines to search for your product or service find you.

A quick background

Originally, search engines used fairly simple analytical algorithms to find what the user was looking for. The most common practice was simply to rank websites by the frequency with which the search term appeared on the page or in the domain name. They then introduced relational analysis tools which stored word associations, so that, for example, if a user searched for "cars" the search engine would know that a website containing the words "cars" and "flowers" would be less relevant than a website containing the words "cars" and "automobiles". These words that underpinned the core of search engine algorithms were called keywords, and they still form the basis of searches today.

Predictably, once web designers caught on to this, they started placing as many keywords onto their websites as possible to try and boost their search engine rankings. A common practice was to have a large block of white text on a white background containing nothing by keywords for the spiders to absorb. As a result, search results became less and less useful to users, until Google came along.

Google's original concept was simple and very effective. Instead of just looking at the words on websites, Google also looked at the reputation of a website to measure its relevance. This reputation was calculated based on how many other websites linked to yours, working on the theory that generally, people only link to websites that are either interesting or relevant to

whatever topic they are framing around the link. Based on the number of other websites linking to yours (called inbound links or backlinks) your website was assigned a page rank by Google which determined your website's importance. It then ranked search results by both keyword and then page rank to deliver far more relevant results. Google's PageRank is still a very important aspect of all search engine algorithms nowadays.

Google balls

Our SEO services

The following can be taken individually or as a complete package, depending on your needs.

Website assessment

The first step in any SEO project, our website assessment service will examine your website in great detail to determine how it can be improved technically to perform well in the search engines. The basic purpose of this assessment is to establish how "readable" your website is to the search engine spiders, and thus what likelihood of your site being correctly and qualitatively indexed. This is the foundation of any SEO strategy.

Keyword analysis

As search engines still rely heavily on keywords, it is important that you are using the right ones to capture your target market. This is not simply a case of fighting with all your competitors over every keyword pertinent to your industry, but rather about finding the right keywords that fit your customers' actual search queries (speaking in their language, in other words), as well as finding the niche keywords that have less competition and therefore higher yields.

Copywriting

Once you have fixed your technical issues and established your keywords, the next stage is to ensure that all of the text on your website is written with the search engines in mind. This is a highly skilled process, as a website's copy serves primarily to inform and/or convert customers, so text written purely for the search engine spiders will be useless once people actually find and read the website. Our copywriting aim is to strike that balance of readability and search engine richness.

Request an SEO quote →