Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Our SEO experts can analyse your web site and draw up a plan for enhancement of your natural search results. We can then either action this plan on your behalf, or help you web team to implement the necessary changes.

All our Search Engine Optimisation work is ‘ethical’. This means that we do not aim to trick the search engines into listing your site using the latest loophole in search algorithms. We optimise pages and provide content advice using knowledge of all search engines in order to ensure your services are being exposed correctly.

Search engine optimization is a complex subject. The site must be optimised in a way that addresses each of the major search engines of the target market. In English, this means optimising for Google, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) as well as MIVA (formerly Espotting) and other niche engines for your industry.

The engines tend to work using a mixture of ‘relevance’ and ‘ rank ’. Relevance is where the engine determines how relevant the search term is to your page, and placement of the term in strategic places on the page (without spamming) can enhance the page’s score. The rank is determined by other means and provides a measure of how important the engine thinks your site is. Google, for example, ranks a site by counting how many sites link in to it. It adds more weight if the site linking in has itself got a good rank. For example, if your site is referenced, and linked to, by a news article on the BBC web site, then this will be very good for your page rank. Top ranked sites have thousands of quality sites linking in.

Our SEO service consists of the following elements. Note that a package of measures will be designed for your site and your target keywords in order to beat your competition.

On-page recommendations
We provide detailed recommendations of on-page changes that will increase the relevance of the pages to the target keywords.
On-site recommendations
We analyse the structure of the site and internal linking in order to flow page rank correctly within the site. This analysis also looks at multilingual issues and the language selector if relevant to your site.
The on-page and on-site recommendations are packaged in an Search Engine Optimisation consultation report that provides detailed instructions as to how to optimise the site.
Link Building
Performance on the search engines is largely dependent on external links. A Search Laboratory link building package contains all or some of the following elements:
- Direct link building
  We approach link targets directly and ask for a link.
- Directories
  Your site needs to be listed on SEO friendly directories. This is essential as they pass page rank and trust rank into the website. As part of this work we will also assess any directories specific to your sector.
- Blogs
  Blogs are an excellent source of links. Participation in and creation of blogs are tools that we employ to build natural links.
- Articles/Content
  Google likes content. Creating content and articles and the syndicating (telling other people about) that content attracts links.
- Link bait
  Link bait is long and valuable content that when hosted on your site and syndicated correctly will attract links without asking for them. It is not applicable to all sites, but if used correctly can spawn hundreds or thousands of links.
- PR
  Many companies issue press releases but do not syndicate them correctly on line. Search Laboratory can create or modify existing press releases in order to optimise them for SEO purposes. When news sites pick up the press release it will contain links back to your site on your target keywords.

At Search Laboratory we work with many clients on SEO, from on line retailers to building societies and IT companies.

Contact us now for a free consultation.