Search Engine Optimisation Australia by e-CBD

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

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 quality and content of sites that link to you
• The text on your page
• The titles you've given to your pages
• The headings you've given to the different sections of your pages

We 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 pg 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?

Have a look at our packages . All the details of what we do are there in black and white. We also strongly suggest you read the rest of the questions on this page as well to get an understanding of why we do what we do.

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 resources they thunk are useful. Our job is to find them and let them know about you.

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 three 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:

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?

We have four main SEO Packages. The first is $350 for 12 months (these prices are in Australian dollars), the second is $660 for 12 months, the third is $1300 for 12 months and the fourth is $4000 for 12 months. You can read more about them here.

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.

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.

How do I know it's working? Do you send us reports so we know what's happening?

Yes, but you get what you pay for — the more expensive packages have ranking and traffic reports each month — sometimes sooner if something changes.

Do you guarantee your service?

Yep.

We guarantee that if you're not happy with what we've done after three months you get your money back.

We'll also guarantee that your site will appear in a certain spot on Google and a few other main search engines. Where exactly depends on which package you take out. Sometimes we guarantee top 30, other times top ten, and if you really want to be number one we'll guarantee that too.

Bull! You're lying. No one can do that. How?

We reckon there's no point in providing a service where there's no expectation of results. If we didn't provide a guarantee you'd just be gambling and you'd be better off locking the kiddies in the car and spending your stash at the casino.

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.

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

For a table with some of our recent results in it have a look at our results page. It's pretty impressive — or click here to check out some of our search engine optimisation case studies and testimonials

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Other Useful Links

• Google search engine optimisation forum at WebMasterWorld.com
• Search engine marketing and optimisation information at SearchEngineWatch.com