Search engine marketing

Would you print 10,000 brochures and then leave them on the pavement in front of your office, hoping the right people will come along and find them?

No, of course you wouldn't. However, that's what most businesses are doing with their websites. A great-looking, highly usable website, with exciting functionality and compelling calls to action is of no use if no-one ever visits it.

That's where Search Engine Marketing or SEM comes in. It's about getting your website found. Broadly speaking, there are two main areas in SEM; Search Engine Optimization and Link Building.

Search Engine Optimization

In the search engine optimization business, one of the key distinctions between amateurs and professionals is a complete understanding of how the system works and why it works the way it does.

An amateur might "tweak" a page and call it "optimized" but a professional is capable of explaining why they do everything they do and can quickly adapt their work to changes by the search engines. At UnderDesign, we understand search engines. We know how spiders work, how engines prioritize listings, the effects of parsing and caching and how content is indexed in each different engine.

We understand the anatomy of each type of search engine listing; organic, sponsored or pay-per-click (PPC) and directory listings. We know how to conduct link analysis, how each engine will process queries and how results are ranked and retrieved.

We also have a handle on what's going to happen in the future. We have a finger on the pulse of localization, context, personalization and we are aware of the change in website structures and the semantic web.

We understand how to put together a good keyword strategy and can handle all the phases of discovery, research, metrics and keyword selection. We know how to map those keywords to the content on your site and we know how to ensure that a page is "crawlable" and that a websites' navigation is search engine friendly.

We know how to get a site indexed and how to truly optimize pages; the key elements, the layout, the density of keywords and HTML issues that need to be addressed. We understand how to write good copy for Search Engine Optimization.

We have vast experience in blending design with SEO, how to handle dynamic text replacement, sitemaps, JavaScript menus and Flash. We fully understand the issues and opportunities brought by the new wave of Content Management System based websites.

In short, we're not amateurs. We're professionals. You may not fully understand everything you have just read, but that's the point. We understand it, so you don't have to.

We know how to get your site noticed, and how to get people to "click through" and visit your site.

Getting your site noticed doesn't always have to mean high search engine rankings and that's where Link Building comes in.

Link Building

The importance of link building as part of any Search Engine Marketing strategy cannot be understated. In today's online environment, it is next to impossible to rank highly for any but the least competitive phrases without some level of links leading to your site.

But the question is: how do you get those oh-so-vital links? And how do you make sure that those links are of a good enough quality for the search engines to class them as being significant?

There are a number of strategies that you can adopt to increase the link counts into your website. Again, we have the skills and knowledge to be able to manage a complete link building strategy for your business, including the proprietary Google technologies of PageRank and TrustRank as well as the more common technologies of relevance, location, context and anchor texts.

We have considerable experience in creating directory submissions, managing link exchange strategies, content distribution, writing and distributing press releases, blog and forum comments, link baiting and paid link management.

If Search Engine Marketing - both Search Engine Optimisation and Link Building - are an important strategy for your business and your business website, then why not give us a call or drop us a line and arrange an informal chat with our SEM specialist.