Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your website Search Engine-friendly, helping you to rank higher in the results.

There are a variety of waiting periods you must endure once your site has been optimised and the submissions start. This is because each search engine has different indexing times and waiting periods for reviewing and adding sites. Knowing and understanding these waiting periods before beginning can eliminate any frustration and confusion. Waiting periods can range from two days to four-six months. As a guide, you should be able to see a boost in your rankings on Yahoo within 14 days. Adwords in Google can appear within 24 hours, but it can take up to 6 months to obtain an organic listing (an organic listing is a listing that has not been paid for and the results appears on the left hand side in Google).

Unless you pay, or a search engine marketing company pay the search engines. No one can guarantee to get your site to the top of the main search engines quickly and permanently. Remember, Search Engine Optimisation companies don’t own the search engines! They use their expertise to optimise, submit and monitor positions.

You can do it yourself if you have the time to run your own business and kept up to date with constantly changing optimisation techniques and changes in Search Engine Algorithms which are out of date almost as soon as you master them. I don’t recommend that you try. Let us use our expertise and knowledge to work with you to obtain the rankings your site deserves.

Keywords and keyphrases must be relevant to your site. An example of a keyword would be 'car'. An example of a keyphrase would be 'British car' or 'Classic British car'. If you want to drive good quality and focused traffic to your site use a good descriptive keyphrase.

Search Engines rely on automated tools called "robots" (sometimes also called 'spiders') to collect information from websites. This information is added to the Search Engine's database, based on a number of criteria, including page content, page title, links, etc.
Directories use human editors to look at websites and to decide how to categorise sites for inclusion. Yahoo! and Open Directory Project are two popular Directories.

The best way to improve your ranking is by incorporating good design and good content into your pages. People who come to a website are looking for information, and the best sites are those with the best information. If you have good text and tell a compelling story, you will rank higher. If it is easier for people to move around your site to collect that information, you will rank even higher.

A: Unfortunately not. While this was of assistance some time ago, due to the number of people who abused this area of the algorithms most of the main search engines reduce the weighting of your domain name in regards to getting your site ranked. In addition to this, having multiple sites with different domain names in order to try and improve ranking across a number of terms, is more likely to have a negative impact then a positive.

As with all things in optimisation, get it right and you're climbing the ladder, however get it wrong and it could be disastrous. We are always happy to advise on anything that you feel you would like to do to your site to improve rankings, so please ensure that you speak to your account manager before making any major changes, or spending any money, it might not just save you a fortune, but also protect your site.