FAQ's - Search Engine Marketing, Optimization & Internet Marketing

The questions we're always asked!

Can my normal website design and development company optimise the website?

This is a specialist area. Search Engines are constantly looking to improve how their systems and therefore in order to stay up to date search engine specialists are constantly reviewing and evaluating how the search engines are working. Would you ask a plumber to plaster your walls?

Why doesn’t Orchid Marketing guarantee my search engine ranking?

This is a sales ploy. When guarantees like this are given it will be on particular key word phrases where it is easy to appear at the top. The keyword phrase “hotels Phuket, Trisara” is a lot easier to guarantee a top placement for than “hotels Phuket” simply because there will be less competition. For effective search engine marketing one should always focus on the most effective key words for your target audience.

All the sites at the top of the search engines seem to be portals. Why is this and how can I compete against them?

Portals are attractive to search engines because they normally have a lot of content and many links. In order to compete against a portal you can of course try and compete against the amount of content and number of links, but where individual sites have an advantage is that they can focus their key words to their exact offering. Portals can often only use general, less specific key words.

Is it true, the only way to get to the top is by running a pay per click campaign?

Research shows that searchers put much more value on a website content if it has appeared at the top through “natural” search engine optimization rather than through a pay per click campaign. Often though the popular search query key words have many websites competing to be top of the search engine and pay per click is a quick way to achieve success. Pay per click is not the only way it is though often the quickest.

Can a site be search engine friendly and still have flash applied across the site?

Search engines don’t like flash because they cannot read this image type. All flash intros stop the search engine crawlers. There are ways in which small elements of flash can be used.

My web developer tells me search engine optimization is just about updating meta tags and submitting the site to the search engines?

This is a popular myth and completely wrong. Meta tags aren’t the most important guide for search engines. Without key words in the website content the search engines simply won’t index what you want them to index and just making a submission to a search engine doesn’t mean they will index your pages. Search engines look at many factors including the number and quality of links to your site and content relevance to the key words selected.

After a website has been optimised why does it take so long for a website ranking to improve?

A website crawler (sometimes referred to as a spider) is the part of the search engine that locates and indexes every page on the web that is a possible answer to a searcher’s query. Even if the website pages are re-submitted to the search engines for indexing it may take a while for the search engines to provide you with a ranking.

Once the site has been optimised why does the site need to be reviewed?

The search engine landscape is constantly changing. Search Engines look to provide an excellent service to their searchers and therefore frequently update their algorithms to set the parameters for how websites are ranked. Your website will also be constantly changing, as well as your competitors. In order to stay at the top, the dynamics need to be continually reviewed and will often result in your website needing to be updated.

What sort of information would you need to start work on the site?

We would need to understand your business (what are your products and services, who your target customers are). From this we woudl review your site (Audit it) we would agree a list of activities. To start work we would normally need either access to your source code or a copy of the site and an agreed process for updating.