Advice and tips on obtaining top ten rankings on Google. Search engine optimisation is best left to search engine optimisers who really understand the search engines.

To begin reading this interview with Paul Herbert CEO of Europe’s leading search engine optimisation company click here:

Q. Why are your search engine optimisation methods not common knowledge?

A. We are in the business of optimising websites it is not our job to give advice. None of the top optimisation companies are going to share trade secrets if they discover a new process that gets results. That would be like telling people the winning numbers on the lottery if you new what they were. All professional search engine optimisation companies are in competition with each other and keep their cards very close to their chests.

Q. Can any website be optimised so that it gains top rankings on Google?

A. The simple answer to that is no. The more complex answer is yes if there is a budget for a complete rebuild and development. Most websites are not built for the search engines and/or considered too small and therefore passed over by the search engines for the more competitive searches. These websites are normally low grade sites built by budget website designers and a waste of money. In cases like this, it is normally more economic to discard the whole thing and start again.

Q. How do you start to optimise a website?

A. There are a number of stages to go through before touching the site in question. The first is to find out as much about the clients business and ambitions for the website. Their product or services, their client demographics, information about related businesses and business connections and what they are really expecting their website to achieve. The next stage is to research their competition by doing related searches on the search engines. Which websites do well, how much traffic they get, their linking strategies, content, any optimisation they have had done, are they networked, are they using cluster pages, parked systems, partitioned content and any more of hundreds of optimisation techniques. The research alone will normally take 16 to 24 hours depending on the project.

Q. Is it important to do all this research?

A. Yes of course. The search engines are like league tables or a race. You have to know your competition; you have to know how they achieve their results before setting out your own game plan. Search engine optimisation companies who claim that they can get a website into the top ten of Google without doing this research are the people who give our industry a bad name. How can you possibly do any job without knowing what your competition is capable of?

Q. Then what happens?

A. We then prepare a quote with full specifications in plain English laying out what we will be doing to the site and telling the client what we will require from them by way of content.

Q. Do you provide any guarantees?

A. No – none whatsoever. That is why we do not make any up front charges for our services, preferring to invoice clients once we have achieved the agreed results. Search engine optimisation is not the same as designing and building a website where you can see an immediate end product. Search engine optimisation takes time and we are confident in our abilities to achieve results. I would caution anyone against paying any money up front, even if the optimisation company concerned is offering a money back guarantee. Optimisers who know their job don’t need to charge up front.

Q. How long does it take for a client to start to see results?

A. Within ten to fourteen days of the optimisation work being completed is the norm. If we are not seeing top ten rankings on Google within this time frame, it is normally because we have missed something or got something wrong. In which case we revisit the project and restructure the optimisation. This, however is a rarity and I can’t remember the last time we had to do this.

Continue reading this interview about website optimisation.

If you are looking for advice on optimising a website where Google and other search engines have less than a million pages indexed for searches related to your business, sometimes a few well chosen keywords and meta tags will suffice, providing you have enough related content.

If on the other hand Google has indexed over 10 million pages, forget the thought of doing this yourself. You need to employ the best search engine optimisers.

If you have a website that you needs optimising, why not have a chat to us.