Back in the 90's not many people had websites, but that didn't matter because the internet was simply a curiosity. That started to change, slowly at first, but within a couple of years it became apparent that business could be done online, and a few years after that it started to become obvious that businesses ignored the internet at their peril.

Succesful businesses now realise that conquering the internet is more than simply having a website, or a web address on your stationary. If you want to be found online, you have to ensure you can be found online, simply registering with search engines is not enough.

Faced with the task of indexing literally billions of webpages, search engines have had to become increasingly sophisticated. Unfortunately that means if organisations want to be found via search engines they must take a similarly sophisticated approach too.

You'll find emails in your inbox, and even adverts from pretty genuine companies offering a hundred, a thousand maybe even a million links to your website, to a) bring in more visitors and b) inflate your rankings in search engines. IT DOESN'T WORK. These link schemes don't work, though you'll be given some pretty impressive and convincing spiel - the people behind Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Inktomi etc. are smarter than the people who are trying to con them.

Furthermore, the major search engines now penalise sites who appear to be trying to fool them. So that £200 you spent on 500,000 links could have cost you so much more - permanent removal from a search engines index.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the term given to a variety of practices associated with making websites more visible and attractive to search engines. There are several flavours of SEO (listed below), but for maximum effect and minimum medium to long term expenditure it's necessary to work to an SEO strategy.

Flavour One: Site Optimisation - simple really. Find out what the visitors you'd like to visit your site are actually looking for. Then make sure your site has the kind of content search engines are going to register and direct people your way.

This is where we step in. We can find out how your present visitors are finding you, what other terms are used to find sites like yours, the kind of language your competitors are using, and from there objectively fashion the right kind of content for your site. Once we have the content, we can insert it in your site in a way in which search engines will readily pickup.

Flavour Two: Links. Google started it and the others have followed; a significant measure of your sites importance (and therefore your position relative to the competition) is the number of sites linking to you. Links to your site and your pages 'vote' for you, it's like web democracy.

But it's no longer about quantity (see the spamming section below), it's about quality of links. What you need are the right kind of links pointing to your site, we can organise that too.

Flavour Three: Pay-per-click. You might have heard of Adwords™ and Overture™. They allow you to buy your way into search results - appearing ahead of your competition, they certainly deliver results - but at a price.

These are such popular and capable systems that they may always deserve a place in your SEO strategy, but they're not easy to use, and it's certainly tricky to maximise your potential with these approaches.

We can advise you on your ad-campaign, get you up and running and visitors coming to your site from day one.