What can you do about it?
Here you will find all that you need to know to achieve a successful website promotion solution.You will find information on methods of promoting your web site, tips on how to optimise your web site to maximise your success in search engine promotion. You will also find important information on what not to do. Performing certain actions can result in your site being blacklisted by search engines and directories. There are certain practices that you absolutely must avoid, which many so-called internet marketing companies still perform, and that will get you banned from the search engines.

Is optimising my site easy?
Well, look at it this way....riding a bike is easy, but competing in the Tour de France is best left to the experts. If you wish to try it yourself, you will probably wish to subscribe to our newsletter. Just be aware of the risks of optimising your site yourself. Remember, we do this day in, day out, so we believe we can truly call ourselves professionals. Before you decide, we suggest that you sign up to our free newsletter and receive our complementary ebook guide to myths about search engine optimisation.

Are there standards that we should be aiming for?
2ci2i rigorously supports the SEO Code of Ethics, developed by Bruce Clay in the USA. We strongly encourage others in our industry to do likewise, or to support a similar code. We believe that the professionalisation of Internet Marketing can only lead to a better service for clients and to increased understanding of this industry, where there is currently quite a lot of fog. We will do what we can here, to clear as much of the fog away as possible.

How do I optimise my site?
If you want to try optimising your site yourself, why not subscribe to our newsletter?

Why is search engine promotion important?
Are your website and the ongoing costs around supporting and maintaining it, really paying for themselves to the extent that they could? Is it what you hoped and expected when you developed it?

Additionally, ask yourself, "Do we know what ROI is our website producing and, if so, does it exceed what we both require and expect?".

You may have spent a great deal of money on designing your web site, perhaps including e-commerce to sell online. But is your website producing the return on investment that you or your management expected of it? Without positioning the relevant pages from your site in front of people who are looking for your product, your hard-earned cash and your efforts will have been wasted.

If you want to get your products, services and hard-earned brand identity in front of your customers, you will soon find that designing a website that wins design awards is simply not enough -indeed, far from it. The site needs to be placed in front of potential visitors or they will not know that you, your site or your brand even exist.

Many web design companies are staffed by trained graphic designers. These people may be highly skilled in their field, able to turn out the most attractive (and sometimes, most costly) web sites.

Unfortunately, many such designers have little or no knowledge of how these web sites will perform when potential customers are trying to find you or your products or services. Getting your web site in front of potential customers, through search engine marketing, is where we excel.

Why do Search Engines matter to me?
It has recently been shown that, statistically, more customers looking for a product will use a search engine or directory than any other way. Once that customer has found you and lived through a successful transaction, they will most likely bookmark your web page. For new customers, there is no more popular method of trying to find what they are looking for than through search engines.

The truth is that, unless your site appears within the first three pages, and preferably the first ten entries, it is unlikely that any prospective new customers will see it.

What is critical to the success of any such web site initiative is not only to bring visitors to your website, but relevant visitors who are looking for your products or services. Without reaching your targeted market segment or niche, your web site is likely bleeding money. It will certainly not be fulfilling its potential.

However, you can avoid wasted time and expenditure, and bring considerable numbers of qualified and targeted visitors to your website, in as little as a few hours. To find out how, read on....

Our Solutions
In order to put your shop window -your web site- in front of your customers, you need to properly promote your website. This will involved one or more of the following components of search engine marketing:

Search Engine Optimisation: when done correctly, millions of online searchers will be able to find the relevant pages from your site at or near the top of the search engine rankings. This is sometimes abbreviated to SEO.

Search Engine Advertising : this may be through a carefully managed search engine advertising campaign. These can be very cost-effective, starting at only a few pence per qualified visitor to your site. These campaigns can include fixed placement, or Pay-For-Placement programs, often known as pay-per-click or PPC.

These programs can produce rapid results, with SEO producing excellent results in a period of as little as a couple of weeks.

Search Engine Advertising can produce even faster results, sometimes bringing relevant targeted visitors in a matter of days or even a few hours. It is the fastest and simplest way for advertisers to appear in the number one spot on the leading search engines.

It is the integration of web design, development, and SEO with focused marketing and promotion tactics that is vital to the success of a site. Without smart promotion a great website will fail in its purpose.

Not only can 2ci2i manage your Search Engine Optimisation and/or your Search Engine Advertising program for you, using our expertise and dedicated tool sets, we will, wherever possible, take every opportunity to reduce your costs of achieving these positions on the leading search engines.

The Benefits of Outsourcing Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing, embracing both SEO and PPC, is a very specialist area, requiring specific high levels of expertise and access to dedicated custom toolkits. Without these resources in place, it is unlikely that success will be achieved whilst avoiding the serious pitfalls and consequences that lurk in the arena of search engine marketing.

There are very many variables in performing effective Search Engine Marketing. Some websites, in highly competitive industries, may require daily attention.

Search Engines change the algorithms that they use to rank sites on almost a daily basis. Only a company that specialises in Search Engine Marketing can expect to keep up with all that is happening in this rapidly changing environment and adjust clients' campaigns accordingly.

The Dangers of Doing It Yourself
As important as knowing what to do, and when, is knowing what not to do. Many search engines (such as Google) and directories (such as Yahoo, which is commonly mistaken for a search engine) will either not allow your pages to be listed or, even worse, blacklist your site for not following their individual guidelines. This can obviously be a disaster.

It must also be said that some of the techniques advocated by some so-called experts will actually cause search engines to blacklist sites. What worked last year or last month will most likely not work this month and may cause significant damage. This is why we strongly suggest that you trust such a function, critical to commercial website profitability, to a company that you can trust.

Search Engine Marketing - Why You Can Trust 2ci2i
In all we do at 2ci2i, we only work with clients with whom we can establish a relationship that embraces trust. Our business relies on our reputation and our clients must be able to rely on, and have total trust in, our abilities to perform to the highest standards.

We highly value our clients' confidentiality in all respects. We will never discuss one client with another, actual or potential, without express written permission.

We always act with each client's individual best interests in mind. If unsure, we will always clarify these with you.

We will provide you with clear and regular management reports that enable you to calculate, as closely as possible, your ROI, or return on investment.

We work with up to date toolsets and information on how each major search engine operates at a particular point in time.

We submit to all the major search engines. It is total fallacy to suggest that it is better to submit to hundreds of thousands of so-called search engines, a technique offered by many cheap software products to encourage do-it-yourself website promotion. All these are likely to produce is thousands of spam emails.

What we do at 2ci2i
Our search engine marketing services fall into two main and complementary areas, search engine optimisation and search engine placement.

Search engine optimisation involves fine tuning the relevant pages of your website so that "spiders" at search engines and human representatives at search directories will promote your pages to higher rankings.

Search engine placement involves placing advertisements within a top search engine page either as a paid placement or as a pay per click placement. There are various methods and combinations available with multiple search engines and directories, many of who place their adverts on pages of other search engines. Knowing where to advertise, with whom, at what time of day and in which countries will really make the most of your marketing budget. This approach can bring targeted relevant customers, who are looking to purchase your product, to your site for as little as a few pence per customer.

Service Details
Whilst all client remits are different and we approach each client with an eye to designing the required tailored solution within your budget, here, as an example, are the basics of the SEO steps that we perform during a typical assignment.

2. We work with you to produce a listing of appropriate keywords and key phrases, relevant to what you sell. You may be surprised at what will and will not bring targeted traffic. The keywords or phrases represent what your customers would put into a search box.

3. We consult with you on the look and feel of your website, its usability, ease of navigation and suitability for search engine indexing.

4.We produce or recommend optimised tags and text content changes for your individual web pages, including title, keyword and description.

5.We perform a customised website review to identify possible areas of danger or entries that may be counterproductive to achieving high search engine rankings.

6.We submit your pages to the major search engines, including Google, MSN, HotBot, AllTheWeb, AOL, AltaVista, AskJeeves and other major Search Engines.

7. We can perform paid express submission to Yahoo. We can achieve directory placements within 30 days, often 10 days and as little as 3 days if your requirement is urgent.

8. We will perform initial manual submissions to the top search engines & directories using our customised submission techniques.

9. We will produce and send search engine submission confirmation reports as well as provide email and phone assistance, should you require it.

10.We will send you regular (or one-off, dependent upon your requirements) detailed ranking reports, showing your improved rankings for your pages.

Options:
We can help you to monitor how these efforts are having a direct effect on your increased sales and profitability. We can also include submission to smaller, secondary search engines and specialist directories. We will explain the details of these during initial engagement planning.

As another very effective premium option, we will build a reciprocal linking program, in order to build your link popularity. This is a key part of search engine optimisation and will significantly help with further boosting your rankings.

Pricing
These solutions are for commercial customers and are priced so as to give an excellent ROI on your organisation's investment. We have especially attractive discounts for charities, not-for-profit organisations and individuals, as well as for local organisations in the Newbury and West Berkshire areas. These will generally be offered at highly attractive rates. Please contact us for further information.