Laser Technik Ltd

Providing Internet services for over a quarter of a century

Search engine optimisation

SEO is the name for a collection of techniques intended to help a web site come high in search engine results (primarily Google as that has by far the largest market share).

Of course you’d like your web site to be first or near the top of the listings but the odds are heavily stacked against you, Google lists around 60 billion pages and increasing.  The owners of every one of those wants to come out on top too.  A recent report suggests new web sites are being created at a global rate of over 6 per second although not all will find their way onto Google.  There are over a billion obsolete sites still on-line and many of those are still included in Google results.  Nearly two thirds of web sites are in English (or bi-lingual with an English version in addition to the local language).

As the proud owner of a great website it’s understandable that you’d like it to come high in SERPS (search engine results pages/positions). How can you achieve that?  As a web site owner you will unquestionably be in receipt of emails promoting SEO services.  There’s a word for that: SPAM.

If you want to engage such a service there are organisations that market their search optimisation services in more acceptable ways and some can deliver improvements but you may baulk at the cost.

SEO providers have a long history of coming up with deceptive techniques to deliver better SERPS, Google regard that as an unfair exploitation of their system and are in a continuous battle to identify and block those techniques.  That is evidenced by the howls of protest when a business that’s been successful in gaining high SERPS suddenly finds they’ve dropped out of sight and their business dries up. 

Google’s aim is to deliver the best results in response to a search, if your web site is the best match for the search phrase entered and matches other criteria in their (secret) algorithm, it will get good SERPS.  They have an alternative route to priority listing for commercial sites, that is to pay.  That means using Google AdWords, search phrases are offered through a complex dynamic auction system and it is very competitive (i.e. costly).

At Laser Technik we do not offer an SEO service.  That’s because we remain unconvinced that any SEO service can deliver a positive ROI (Return on investment) i.e. improved sales or profit, they may deliver more visits to your web site, the issue is whether enough of those convert to sales and whether the additional profit from those sales is greater than the cost of the SEO service.   If any SEO were to offer to charge nothing but a percentage of the increased profit resulting from their actions I would be delighted to hear about it.  That doesn’t mean we do nothing, when we work on a web site it is with an awareness of Google’s published guidelines for webmasters.  With WordPress sites we install an SEO tool which does some of the basics and provides clients with a simple way to modify that (if they see fit) and we can provide guidance as to best practise.  We can undertake that task too but as a chargeable extra.

Google isn’t the only search engine but it does command most of the market, Microsoft Bing comes second and so best practise is to target Google but use the free helpful features both Google and Bing offer: Bing “Places for Business” & Google “My Business” (To save a little effort, if you set up Google “My Business” first then you can import the settings to Bing “Places for Business”).  Both those free tools are overlooked by many businesses and they do deliver a worthwhile benefit for little effort.

Never forget that search engines are only one way to get visitors to your web site, if you rely solely on that source you are taking a very big risk.  Speak to ourselves or any marketing expert to identify which of the many additional ways will be relevant to your situation.