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No. Scotz.Net can't guarantee that we can get you on to the first page of a search engine's search results; well, not unless you are going to throw pots of money at us. And I do mean pots of money. A year or two back it was reported that it cost one major airline £6 million to be number one with one of the major search engines.
What we can do is to promote your web site in such a way as to get you much further up the list of search results for any phrase that your potential customers would use e.g. "holidays in perthshire".
The basic techniques to making your web site visible are:
- Content, content and content.
Search engines thrive on content and this must be incorporated in such a way as to help search engines and not hinder them
- Technical stuff, the stuff behind the scenes, the stuff that your customers never see, must be search engine friendly,
- Search engines must be told about you,
- Your web site must be seen where your customers go.
All basic commonsense. As ever, get the basics right and the rest falls into place. But it does take knowledge and effort to get it right. It will also require a budget.
Click on any Tex Spex heading to get more information.
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TEX SPEX
Search Engine Optimisation
HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?
When a search engine knows about your web site, it accesses it electronically and gathers lots of information about the technical aspects and content. It then stores this information in its own database together with a link to the relevant web page.
When a visitor to the search engine enters a search word or phrase it is compared to this database and the search results, together with basic details (including a link to the web page), are displayed.
In order to keeps its own records up to date, the search engine will re-visit your web site from time to time.
HOW DO I START?
Assuming that you are reasonably satisfied with your current web site, your first step is to get your web site in order from the point of view of content. Spelling mistakes simply irritate humans but they send search engines into a tiswas.
Once the content of the web site is as it should be, the behind the scenes technical aspects have to be dealt with. This is often an iterative process with some slight modifications being made to the content.
The third stage is to ensure that the search engines know of your web site.
The above processes, on their own, will improve the visibility of your web site. It will not put you at the top of the list of search engines. To get there, or even close, you will need a full marketing plan and that is a separate topic altogether.
IS IT EXPENSIVE?
Essentially, your web site is a form of advertising and, like all advertising, it can eat up money as if it is going out of fashion. So become knowledgeable and stay focussed.
The costs are incurred when we:
- modify the content of your web site to make it more search engine friendly,
- modify the technical aspects of the web site to make it more search engine friendly,
- submit your web site to search engines and monitor these to ensure that registration is successful.
We will be able to provide you with an estimate of the work involved once we have inspected your web site.
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