Instant e-commerce success
An e-commerce website, designed and launched by Cambridge-based web developers MJB Data in March 2005, has generated orders worth 5-figures in its first month without any advertising spend, thanks to MJB's search engine optimisation skills.
MJB Data have been so successful at getting Google, the world's largest and most popular search engine, to feature the new website that customers started to find the site before the payment facility was complete and thousands of pounds worth of orders had to be processed over the phone during the week before the site was officially launched.
"You can never guarantee how long it will take to get a new website listed in the search engines", says MJB Data's proprietor Matthew Barnett, "we were allowing for a week or two for the site to be crawled by Googlebot and appear in Google's results".
Googlebot is the name of the programme that Google uses to capture the contents of websites that it then uses to build its search index. You can't pay to have your website included in Google's main search results, so how do you get a website listed?
Getting listed
"Strategic linking is the best way. If you place a link on a website that is visited by Googlebot every day it's highly likely that it and other search engine spiders will follow the link and crawl your site." adds Matthew, "That's the easy bit. Where most people struggle is coming up with a significant amount of original content in the first place - and that's often the real key to success."
Top ranking
With over 8 billion web pages featured in Google at the moment, many website owners are less interested in how to get into Google, and more concerned with how to appear on the front page for particular keywords. "Everyone asks that." says Matthew, "There are lots of ways of improving a site's ranking for target search terms, but the advice I give to people who want to perform well on search engine is to remember that search engines like Google are trying to match the things people search for to the best possible online resource. If you want to be no.1 for the search bananas your site needs to be a better result for the word bananas than any other. Sure, there are tips and tricks that old hands like me use, but you can't beat good content."