How the SEO Process Works

"We are all something, but none of us are everything".......... Blaise Pascal



Long before we start working on your site’s optimisation, we like to have a face-to-face meeting to discuss the needs of your business, as well as the aspirations that you have for it. We have found that by far the best way to proceed is when we are all working toward the same goal, otherwise misunderstandings may occur, wasting time and resources for both parties.

The following subheadings show the bare bones of what we will be doing on your behalf to achieve maximum positive results.

Your Position in the Marketplace

As any successful business owner knows, it is vital to know who your clients are. This makes it easier to hit the target when it comes to projecting the right image. Badly constructed, or visually unappealing sites are simply a waste of time and money.

Web sites are becoming one of the most powerful of all the marketing tools that any business can use. This linked to email marketing campaigns, company blogging and authorative articles for your trading sector should all be considered when constructing an effective SEO plan.

It has been estimated that there are currently over 1 billion websites and almost 1 billion blogs. With this in mind it’s not hard to see how important optimisation is.

Competitor’s Web Presence

During our consultation we try to establish who your main competitors are, and how they are fairing on the web. As part of our initial report, we look carefully at the websites your site will be up against, checking the level of optimisation that has been applied to them. This will give us an idea of how easy/hard it will be to overtake them in the search engine results.

Current Website Analysis Report

If you already have a website, we will take a very careful look at the following points:

General Page and Site Structure

We look carefully at the background coding of the site to make sure that it conforms to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. This includes checking the stated document type statement and making sure that the code used (html, xhtml etc.) conforms to the proper standards. Although many sites function quite well without everything being in order, conforming to these rules will make the site as accessible as it can be to the most people.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are often used to control the look and feel of a site. Our report includes analysis on its conformity.

We also look at and report on other code languages used within the site such as Javascript, ajax, asp, php, flash etc, as well as any content management system (CMS), database, intranet and extranet integration, checking their quality and positioning within the site.

Suggestions are then made as to how these might be improved for SEO if necessary.

Another factor often overlooked by designers is making the site more accessible to those with restricted eyesight. There are many ways to improve this without ruining the look of an attractive site. We include a
few suggestions within our report.

Keyword Analysis

Perhaps one of the most important parts of any website are the Keywords that are used within its titles, META tags and visible page content. Spammers often get sites banned for using a technique known as ‘keyword stuffing’. This is the dubious practice of over-using relevant keywords that a person might use when browsing for one of your products in order to fool the search engines.

Any good SEO consultant will tell you that the algorythms (complex sort of mathematical and word filters) that the search engines use are highly sophisticated as they try to stay one step ahead of Black Hat techniques. It is just not worth trying to fool them - rather we need to work with them.

As well as analysing the currently used keywords, we will make a detailed list of appropriate keywords that could be used, and more importantly, where they should be used within each page.

There are many tools (some reliable, some extremely unreliable) available to help define keywords. We have the best that are available as well as our personal experience as to what actually works.
META Information.

Although not as important as it used to be, META information still has a part to play in SEO. Our report includes suggestions for extra tags or wording within existing tags.

Inbound Link Analysis

For any site to look popular enough and therefore desirable to search engines, it is important that other sites link to your site. This is also one of the most dangerous of all the disciplines within SEO as there are not only good links, but also some very bad ones.

Search engines are looking for relevant and good quality links to your site to consider it important. This often includes links that use keywords or text within them rather than those that simply put www.yoursite.com in their listings.

We check all your existing links. It is quite normal to find a few links in some of the more dubious directories (some that have even been blacklisted), especially if your site is quite an old one. We will include a short report on whether we think your site is suffering from such dubious links, and offer a solution.

Outbound and Internal Link Check

Exchanging links with other sites to get them to link to your site is all very well, but did you know that some of these outbound links could literally suck the value out of your site? We analyse all outbound links (if you have any) and make suggestions for avoiding any negative effects from these links.

We also check for broken links within your own site. Broken links can make a site look uncared for. Search engines don’t like this. We also look at how effective your internal links are to draw clients in to the desired sections of your site.

Sitemap Check

Sitemaps are a type of index that encourages search engine robots to spider the whole of your site. It is important that these are written correctly, as badly written sitemaps can do as much harm as good.

Server Check

We take a look at the web server that hosts your site, checking response times, accessibility, security and that it is not associated with a blacklisted ip address in any way. We also check your DNS records.

Plan of Attack


In view of the foregoing, it is therefore important that your SEO consultant gets to know your website/graphic designer and liaises as much as possible when making changes to your site.

If you currently use a content management system (CMS) to enable your employees to personally update sections of your site, it is also important that they have guidance form the SEO company. A badly run CMS structure can ruin much of the good SEO work.

Well-meaning employees can create problems for a site by carrying out a bit of unscheduled ‘SEO’ work, perhaps exchanging links with a colleague at another company. It is always best to run any changes past an experienced SEO operative wherever possible.

Programme of Events

When employed to start improving a websites ranking we generally implement or help implement that changes that have already been mentioned. We can carry this out directly, or we can work along with
your web designer to achieve the changes.

We will then endeavour to have any dubious links mirrored content on another site removed by the webmaster of those sites.

You might have employed an optimisation company in the past that thought it was a good idea to cloak a site with similar content to your site or to have lots of domain names all pointing to your site.

We also endeavour to remove all such problems, as they will all affect your ranking.

During this process we will have already made sure that you are listed with the main search engines, and are listed in a select number of high quality directories that improve your site’s ranking. Building high quality links will be part of the long-term process to keep your site high in search engine results. The best types of links are those that are from sites relevant to your product or industry.

Sometimes it is necessary to pay for such links, although Google have recently said that they do not like this practice, so care is needed to retain White Hat status. Search engines like fresh content in web pages. We have found that a few well-chosen and carefully timed changes to your main index page can have a very positive effect on ranking.

If you do not already have one, we will help you to set up a ‘Blog’ (Literally: ‘Web Log’. This is a sort of web diary that has become very popular in recent times).

It is important that your company has at least one blog. A blog helps to propagate your site’s links and any new product ideas throughout the web.We will also give advice on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed setups
for your blog/s.

Your clients as well as many other internet users who have a newsreader installed on their computer can subscribe to these newsfeeds.

They will all help to produce links to your site as well as creating genuine interest in your products.

You or your employees can keep these current. Alternatively we can write them for you. Our copywriting department is able to take some raw data supplied by you and turn it into something more appealing than dry information. We have large ‘Swipe files’ of eye-catching headlines that have been proven to capture reader’s attention.

We can also advise on the use of video on the web. Video is fast becoming the best way of spicing up your internet presence and therefore part of the SEO company’s responsibility.

Measuring Success

It is, of course vital to keep track of any improvement in ranking for various key words and sentences that potential clients have used to find your site.

The SEO company relies on statistics software to prove the results that it is achieving.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an enormously sophisticated tracking software package that enables a webmaster to track many important pieces of information about the usage patterns of those who have accessed the website.

This is an invaluable tool to aid a company to fine-tune the message it is trying to project to potential clients. We use it to track all sorts of information.

Here are just a few examples: We can see if people are ‘bouncing’ away from a site having only briefly visited it. We can observe which of the pages are getting more interest. If people are leaving before reading your contact details, then it is another indication that changes would be beneficial.

We are able to track the effectiveness of pay per click campaigns (if they need to be used before a website appears in the results organically).

It is also possible to check the screen resolution, operating system, browser make and model that a visitor is using. This all helps when thinking about how a site should look to be accessible to maximum number of users.

Working Together

Our whole approach to SEO is one of collaboration. We do not take on more than one client in each sector due to conflicts of interest.

It is in our interest to help your company become successful. You will recommend us to others and we will get paid!

We will always play fair with our clients, and will not knowingly give poor advice that will cost them more money than necessary.

We have a very strict privacy policy that ensures astrict confidentiality and will sign to that effect for your peace of mind. We only use examples in our advertising with the company’s full consent. Most of our clients prefer to remain anonymous.