As a company we are often asked the same questions about our SEO services, we are more than happy to give frank and honest answers and if you are considering using a SEO company for any work I would suggest you prepare some questions of your own, there is also a good article on how to find a search engine optimisation company.

Well here are the answers to some of the more common questions we get, my contact details are to the right of this text so if you have any questions please let me know.

After we have agreed to work together how long would it take before we are list on the front page of search engines (especially Google)

This is a difficult question to answer accurately, but you should be looking at between 3 6 months this could change depending on your competition and the age or design of your site and obviously how competitive the keywords are you need to focus on.

Is it an ongoing process or a one off ‘job’?

This is going to be an ongoing process, the first part of the process it getting you into the positions you want, the next is keeping you there and the third is repeating the process for more terms, so you get the most from your market.

If it’s ongoing what is the term of the contract?

The contract is open ended as we look to grow the site as the business grows, if you wish to cancel at any point then it is just 3 month notice, this is because we will often work more than the allotted number of hours a month, but we do not go more than the equivalent of 3 months over your hours.

As this is literally a results driven process – do we have to pay if you don’t achieve the required results?

I am sorry but it is difficult to enter into this sort of agreement, there are a number of things that you as the site owner will need to do to ensure the site does well in the search engines, and we have no control over our recommendations being put into action.

Also it is very easy for SEO companies to get a site to the top of the search engines very quickly, they then take the payment and when the search engines ban the site a few month later they are long gone.

We guarantee our results by only charging a monthly fee, if you are not happy you can walk away but it is in our interest to keep you as a client.

I hope this answers your questions I have been honest in my assessments and have only discussed time-scales I feel are realistic.

If you have any other questions or need anything clarifying let me know, my contact details are at the side of this page.

Why Cravenplan – for web design Salisbury or Search engine optimisation Salisbury?

We are a small, 3 person SEO team you are not a customer code to us you are a partner that we look to build a long term relationship with.

Dedicated to Search Engine Optimisation – we do not get involved with design or coding of a site, although we have other members of the team that can be brought in for that, all we do is SEO and we do not out source any of our work it is all done in house.

Ethical techniques – Our SEO techniques are ethical we work within the search engines guidelines and produce results that stay in the top positions rather than playing fast and loose and risking you getting banned from the search engines.

Experience – As a company we have been in the web design, building and hosting business for 12 years, I have personally been involved with SEO and on-line marketing for over 7 years and the other members of the team for 2 3 years each.

Local search We know how to get results for local search, so companies in a particular geographic area can benefit from local visitors this is why you can find us for search engine optimisation Salisbury and also web design Salisbury.

Regular reports Once a month we produce a report for you on your progress in the search engines.

No long term contract We do not tie you in to long term contracts, our work is on-going but if you wish to cancel our services we ask for just 3 months notice.

HCI advice More than just SEO work we are also able to give advice on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) this will help you get more enquires from your site.

Flexible hours We will make a recommendation as to the number of hours a month you will need on your site to achieve your goals but the decision on the number of hours you choose is yours.

Proven track record We can show you numerous sites that we work on that have great positions in the search engines and also supply you with contact details of companies who will give us references and recommend us.

We care It sounds a bit corny but we do, our attitude is that if your business is doing well you will spend more with us, and that is why we go the extra mile to ensure your site is a success.

Can you sell your home with out using an estate agent?

Yes it is possible and one of the first problems to overcome is how do people find out that your house is for sale if you do not use an estate agent to advertise it, well luckily the little house company has the answer.

The Little House Company is an online direct advertising service for private property sellers (selling homes without an estate agent).

Reaching the largest online audience of buyers in the UK in the most cost effective way, homeowners can sell their homes direct and save £ 000′s in agents commission.

The Little House Company’s customers get, in a single fixed price package, advertising on a huge network of over 500 sites and services including two of the UK’s leading property portals: FISH4 and Homes & Property – part of the Daily Mail group’s property channel.

The website design automatically optimises the presentation of your property advertising and its exposure on the mainstream services, to ensure the property seller and those looking to buy are most likely to find each other.

The website needed a database that allowed users to add the details of their property to the Little House companies website.

Cravenplan web design Salisbury

To achieve this the little house company turned to Cravenplan to design and build their website, this included bespoke programming and hosting of the finished site, as well as ongoing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The Search Engine Optimisation was a challenge as the housing market is extremely competitive; the challenges were to educate the public to the fact that they were able to sell their home without an estate agent and to attract buyers of properties to the site.

Using PPC

Using Pay Per Click Cravenplan has been able to attract new visitors to the site and encourage more people to sell their homes themselves.

More than 1 million visitors

Cravenplan have had outstanding success with ranking The Little House Company in the organic search engine listings the Search Engine Optimisation team have the site ranking at number 1 for phrases such as “sell my house” and many other related terms this in turn drove more than 1,000,000 visitors to the site in a single year.

400% increase in visitors

During the time that Cravenplan have been working on the Search Engine Optimisation of the site The Little Hose Company have seen a 400 % increase in visitors.

So what does the little house company say about Cravenplans online marketing efforts?

“It’s clear now, what I should have done was pay for maintenance when the site was launched rather than some of the money I wasted on Newspaper advertising. The last ten customers I have got all found my site through the search engines.”

Martin Charlick

Keyword research is the basis and foundation of all your Search engine optimisation efforts, if you choose the wrong keywords or keyword phrases to target then you could be wasting your time and search engine optimisation efforts.

If you knew that 90% of all keywords used get next to no traffic you would start to think more seriously about how you research and target your keywords to ensure you get the best return for your investment of time and money for your website.

It is estimated that 50% of keyword searches in the search engines are made just once, now it would not be worth the time it takes to rank for this keyword phrase if you only get one visitor from it, obviously there are exceptions and we all know that every visitor is a potential customer and spending some time and money to get that customer is worth it over the life of the customer but statistically you need to attract hundreds or thousands of visitors with each of the keywords each month.

For your keyword research to be effective you need to think about what people who are looking for your goods or services would put into the search engines in order to find you. You then need to take these phrases and check how many of the people using the internet have searched for these phrases over the past month.

Remember that the number of people looking for 0800 numbers, that is the UK free phone number could be more or less than the number of people looking for the artist Jack Vettriano that does not mean that one term is better than the other if your business is related to phone numbers in the UK then 0800 numbers is more relevant to your telephone business, where as if you have an art gallery or produce art prints then Jack Vettriano artist is a much better term to promote his art work for.

So you need to consider both relevancy and visitor numbers along side the competition levels when you are completing your keyword research.

When thinking about your linking strategy there are some things you need to consider, are your links properly formatted? are you pointing them to the best pages of your site? are you buying links and is it going to be obvious to Google that is what you are doing?

If for example you were running a cottage holidays website in the South of England, a place where people could come and choose a cottage to stay in for a week or two, how do you avoid being spotted for buying links, some of the give always are that the text on the page has nothing to do with holidays, cottages or the locations that you serve.

The techniques used in linking from high PR pages to other sites worked 2 or 3 years ago and are still of some value but may harm you if one of your competitors tells Google that you are buying links and Google investigates then they could all be discounted, and this is a waste of money.

So what you want in a link? The link needs to come from a page with relevant text, Page Rank is much less important than relevance of the text that is on the page, also the links to your site need to be spread across the site, so that internal pages also have links to them. You need to avoid site wide links as they can appear unnatural, a variety of link text should also be used when linking to the site, so the link text for search engine optimisation Salisbury goes directly to a page about search engine optimisation in Salisbury.

It should be the goal of the site to rank well for 2 – 3 terms per page of the site, the home page should also not rank for more than 2 – 3 terms, otherwise the page begins to look and feel unfocused.

I would also suggest that you undertake some detailed keyword research into various terms that could bring you in more traffic, there are always terms that have been overlooked by your competition, just think, if you rank well for 50 phrases that bring in 500 visitors each a month that is much better than ranking for 2 phrases that bring in 10,000 visitors a month, and the competition is likely to be much less.

The SEO should be an ongoing and ever changing process so that it encompasses the changes in the search engines algorithms but also the changing needs of the company as you grow different keywords will become more relevant and the SEO needs to be flexible enough to incorporate these changes.

Staying at the top of the search engines

It is one thing to get great rankings and be at the top of the search engines for your chosen key words and phrases, you need to be able to stick to the top results when you get their.

The first step is to understand why you have been so successful with achieving these results for your keywords so far.

Remember if you do not know why you have done well you will find it harder to repeat in the future for your next keyword.

Once you have identified the reason for your success you can look at your competitors to see how they are doing, if they are not following your strategy and are not challenging your position then move on to your next keyword but keep an eye on them.

If they are nipping at your heels then you need to increase your marketing to ensure you keep ahead of them.

Getting to and staying at the top of the search engines needs to be your goal and using the help of a search engine optimisation company such as us can be the most cost effective way of getting there.

Cards for good causes the charity Christmas cards company that raises money for more than 320 national and local charities by selling Christmas cards is celebrating its best ever on-line sales.

The charity has been trading on-line for 6 years since having a website designed and built by Cravenplan.co.uk the web design Salisbury team, they also use the search engine optimisation services to promote the website.

The sales history has been dramatic – the second year Cravenplan worked on the site sales were up 13 fold and then they doubled year on year for several years. This year, despite the recession starting to bite, they have made more in online sales than any year in their history.

Each page of your website needs a short, descriptive, unique title. The title should be up to 8 words 40 characters long and should avoid unnecessary filler words, such as and, hello, welcome etc.

This is the blue underlined link you see when you search in Google, so make sure the title is relevant to the information on the page and is eye catching.

The keywords that you wish to rank for should be the first in the title, this gives more enphsis to these keywords in the title and the search engines will know that these words are important to your web page.

The statistics that you get as part of the website hosting package from Cravenplan web design Salisbury is comprehensive and can be confusing; we hope this short explanation will help.

The statistics run on a rolling 30 day period, so if you look on the 19th of March you will see the statistics for the 19th February to the 18th of March. Other reports are available on request.

The General Statistics section has most of the information you will need for a good overview of your sites statistics, so you can see how your search engine optimisation and on-line marketing of your website is going, it is conveniently located at the top of the report just below the graph.

The General Statistics section is divided into several sections these are

Hits

This is the number of files that have been called from the server that your website is on, if you have a page with 5 pictures and some text then you will get 7 hits from 1 visit – 1 each for the 5 pictures, 1 for the text and 1 for the page.

Hits are not a good way of tracking the number of people to your site.

Page views

As the name suggests this is how many pages have been viewed on your site, it is not unusual for one visitor to look at a number of pages, so the page views can be 4 or 5 times the number of visitors.

In general it is good to have visitors looking at more than one page on your site as it helps them gain trust in you.

Visits

This is the number of times your site has been visited, this can be from a person just visiting once, the same person visiting more than once in a given month or from automated search engine programs called spiders.

The visits report is split so you can see how many times the site was visited, the average length of time the visit lasted, although this will also include spiders and so the times for people who visit are often longer than the average shown.

You can also see the number of spiders who visited the site, you want to keep the search engine spiders returning to your site as that means your new content will get indexed by the search engines quickly and people will be able to find the site in the search engines for more of your keywords.

Visitors

These are not necessarily people but it is probably best to think of them that way, as trying to drill down to the exact number of people who visited the site can drive you to distraction.

You can see in the visitors section that it is broken down into unique visitors – those who have not visited the site for more than 30 days.
Those who have visited once, so how many visitors visited the site once this month and finally how many have visited the site more than once in the past 30 days.

I hope this has helped you with any problems you had understanding the statistics from your site.

If you have any further questions a member of the search engine optimisation team will be more than happy to help you.

Alternatively Cravenplan offer a free statistics seminar that you are more than welcome to attend, contact us for more details and to register.

Search engine optimisation tips are available from loads of places on the internet, but here are 3 simple to follow but incredibly helpful things you can do to get found in the search engines.

Keywords

Think to yourself, if I were going to look for the goods and services I sell on my website what would I be looking for, what terms would I be entering into the search engines? Ask your friends and family the same question and write down the responses.

Use these keywords on your site, in the title tags, the description, the body of the text on the page and in the links on your site to the other relevant pages of your site.

Do not over use these keywords, just use them in the text as they would naturally occur, using them over and over again will look messy.

This is the basics of search engine optimisation strategy and the most important part of on-page optimisation.

Title tags

When a web page is written there is a place to add in a title tag for that page, many people just use the same title for every page but this is not the way to do it.

You need to ensure that every page title is unique, contains the keywords that are relevant to that page and describe what the subject of the page is.

Keep the title relatively short, below 65 characters including spaces, no not bother with words such as welcome to our website.

Know your statistics

You can sign up for statistics packages for free, such as analytics from Google, you may have a free statistics package available to you with the hosting company you use, or if you have the budget there are a number of packages that you can buy and install on your server.

These statistics packages will allow you to see how many people have visited your site, what they did when they got there and possibly most importantly how they found you in the first place.

This can be used to great effect for example, if you find that people are finding you using a term you have not optimised for then you can create a page for that keyword, using the keyword in the title and the other places that are good for search engine optimisation, this can then rank in the search engines for that keyword and you should find more people finding you for that term.

This has been a quick over view of how search engine optimisation can be used on your website to good effect, you may like to consider employing the services of a Search Engine Optimiser to help with your search engine optimisation work.