Search Engine Optimisation & Marketing Companies in the UK

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What is SEO and SEM?

Professional SEO

If your company website has been online a long time, you may well have had a phone call from a company promising you better search engine rankings. Professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become big business in recent years, with as many disreputable fly-by-night operators as quality professionals (if not more!). If you're considering hiring a professional SEO firm, make certain you understand a few basics first, lest you fall victim to an outfit who's going to charge you an arm an a leg for doing nothing of use (at best) or getting your site kicked out of the search engines altogether (at worst).

Basic SEO Services

Any good Search Engine Optimisation company will first work on addressing any problems with "search engine unfriendly" features on your website. These basic issues are common knowledge among internet professionals, so the company should be up front with you about exactly what they'll be doing to your site during this stage of the process. These basic issues include optimising your site's meta tags (which is of negligible importance these days, but still part of much routine SEO work), making sure your page code is up to date and standards compliant, and optimising various page features like alt and title tags, header tag content, text navigation and even (in some cases) rewriting your site text to be better targeted towards your important key words and phrases. Be wary of companies who talk about "secret" tags or using hidden text, as some search engines frown upon "sneaky" on-page optimisation techniques.

Other professional SEO strategies include link-building campaigns, designed to get your site more relevant incoming links. Such campaigns may include paid links, submission to directories, and establishing a select few reciprocal links with other quality, relevant websites. Different search engines put differing amounts of importance on these "off-site" promotional efforts, and some search engines have been very aggressive about penalising certain kinds of link networks, so be sure to question how your SEO goes about getting their links ... it is likely they won't give you a very detailed answer (this is one area where different companies do have 'industry secret' techniques in some cases), but be wary if the answer you get involves a link network, or clients-only link exchange or something of the sort.

Naturally, on-page optimisation and link building is not everything there is to know about professional SEO. If it were, there would be no difference between companies, and hardly any need for professional SEOs at all! Most SEO companies will have some proprietary industy-secret techniques they won't explain in detail, whether this is a particular keyword percentage in the page text, an html tag that may not be widely used for optimisation yet, or something else. In some highly competitive fields, it may even be worthwhile for an SEO client to consider higher risk promotion techniques such as page cloaking, certain hidden text techniques, among others. If you are in a position to need such promotion techniques, you're likely to already know it though (or a reputable SEO firm will tell you so) ... In most cases, using an SEO who keeps to the more mainstream promotion techniques we've discussed here is probably all your site will ever need.