Search Engine Optimisation FAQ

Interested in our highly acclaimed search engine optimisation service? Here's a run-down of how we get you to the top and why you need to be there.

So, in a nutshell, what does e-CBD do when we're get asked to get a site to the top of the search engines?

Search engines work by giving searchers the most relevant results for whatever it is they're looking for.

A search engine decides what's relevant by looking at a number of things, including:

• The way you've laid out the text and other content on your page, in particular what sections and words you've given emphasis to, and what titles you've given your pages
• The quality and content of sites that link to you
• The quality and content of websites you've suggested people go and visit

Our search engine optimisation packages address all these issues (and many more) to ensure that when people search for words relative to your business, your website is the most relevant.

Does my website really need to appear at the top of the search engines? Am I actually losing out by not really showing up?

Yes.

But it does depend on a few things. If you're selling something that people aren't likely to buy online or won't go looking for in a search engine, then not being at the top probably won't make a huge difference to your business. If you've got godzillions of dollars to spend on marketing and your brand is known to everybody around the world being at the top of a search engine probably won't do much either — being number one in Google when people look for ‘soft drink' probably wouldn't help Coke sell any more or less. McDonalds don't come up in the top ten for ‘hamburger' but tell the board that's the reason they recently posted their first ever loss and they'll laugh at you — probably quite loudly too.

For the rest of us though, being at the top of the search engines is a hugely effective marketing strategy. In fact, as the The Weekend Australian Financial Review (March 22-23, 2003 p.28) put it:

For businesses, especially web-based businesses, being on the top of Google's list is of incalculable value. To be high on a Google list is to be in mass media.

It's estimated by most monitoring bodies that pretty much everyone uses search engines to find stuff on the web if they don't know the URL (address) of a website. In fact the three most popular websites in the world (Yahoo, MSN and Google) are all search engines.

To Google's credit, it's pretty much taken for granted around the world that if you want to buy a widget but you don't know where to find a widget store, or you've forgotten the name of your favourite widget shop, the best solution to your problem is to type ‘widgets for sale' into Google. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the widget stores that appear first in Google's list are going to get more exposure than the ones that appear 51st or 1001st.

So what exactly will e-CBD do if I ask you to position my website?

We'll make sure it's the most relevant answer to the things people put in the search box when they're trying to find your business. A full run-down on the type of thing we do can be found in this excellent article on building a high ranking website. We don't follow any strict set of rules because each site has different requirements, but that article will give you an idea. We also make sure our client's sites implement Google's guidelines for webmasters. That's the most important thing.

How many search engines will you submit my site to?

At the moment it's about two or three, maybe four if we need to.

Pretty much every search engine worth being in these days comes and finds you. They have things called ‘spiders' which crawl the web from link to link and if you have the right kinds of links to your site, and your pages are optimised properly, they will find you and rank you accordingly.

What we do is make sure the right people who should know about your site find out about it .

Who are the right people to link to my site?

There are many quality directories on the web who provide their users with informative and relevant information. The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) and Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com ) are two good examples of big important ones, but you can bet that whatever your business is, there's going to be someone out there who has put together a website or directory dedicated to it, and they're going to have a list of their favourite links.

But Company X will submit my site to 10,000,000,000 search engines and directories for a low monthly fee of $2, that sounds like a pretty good deal to me?

How many search engines have you used lately? 10,000,000,000? Probably not, in fact you'll most likely find that 99% of your search engine traffic will come from about ten main search engines. Like most free market industries the best businesses tend to get most of the business — it's exactly the same in the search engine world. The other 9,999,999,990 search engines you've never used are probably not worth worrying about, and in fact, may do you more harm than good. As Google states in its webmaster guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html):

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

…At the very least, most of those ‘directories' will want your e-mail address in return for a listing, so if you want to start a pretty comprehensive spam collection, enlarge your penis, consolidate all your debt, and have $6,000,000 sent to your bank account from Nigeria, submitting your e-mail address to this sort of service is a terrific way to get cracking.

How much do you charge then?

Read our packages — prices start at only $350.

How long before I see the results?

Some directories will list you within hours of your submission, but Google and the other main search engines can take anywhere from about 2-8 weeks to start listing your site. Unless you take out a paid listing in a directory that offers a guaranteed placement within a certain time limit (like Looksmart or Overture), there's no way to hurry things up — your website is really at the search engines' mercy. Anyone who appears to be claiming otherwise is either full of it, or wording things very carefully.

But how can you offer this service if you aren't Google? How do you know what Google will do?

Google ranks it's results by relevancy. If your site is optimised to be a relevant site for a particular search term, and the experts in the field think it is good enough to link to then it will get a top spot. Your site has to deserve it though — we don't work miracles and we don't try and trick search engines into thinking your site is more worthy than it really is. If you come to us and your site isn't worthy of getting a good ranking for the search terms we both think are relevant to your business we'll work on it to make sure it is. Simple.

I heard that BMW's website got banned by Google because they were tactics that were against Google's guidelines, how do I know you're not going to do that to my site?

e-CBD is committed to providing clients with an ethical search engine optimisation service that adheres to best-practice principles. We believe the best way to get good results is by creating websites that search engines are happy to promote and any optimisation work we do strictly adheres to the quality guidelines set out by Google (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html), Yahoo! (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html), MSN (http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner...) and the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html).
 
Many search engines provide members of the public with the opportunity to report websites that don't adhere to their guidelines. To ensure that our work is completely ethical, when we optimise a client's website we make certain there is nothing about the site that a competitor could unfavourably report to any search engine.

Do you help us with paid listings and advertising in search engines as well?

Yep.

If you are interested in taking out a paid listing in search engines in Australia or around the world which allow it, we can also organise that for you. We often recommend people use Google Adwords (http://www.adwords.google.com/select/), Looksmart Looklistings (http://www.looklistings.com.au/) and other advertising as a supplementary tactic to optimisation. However, in many cases we wouldn't recommend it because our service will get you to the top anyway — it really depends on your needs and budget.

Show me some references. I want to see what you've actually done.

Click here to check out some of our search engine optimisation case studies and testimonials

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Other Useful Links

• Google's guidelines for webmasters are located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html