Robin and Marion Jones, Croque-en-Bouche, Underdown - Grooms Cottage, Gloucester Road, Ledbury, Herefordshire HR8 2JE. UK

t. +44 (0)1531 636400  f. +44 (0) 870 7066282             mail@croque.co.uk             Site problems? Please let us know, click here

I rent my dedicated webspace from NamesCo. The company has a very good reputation, and also supplies quality broadband.
If you are interested, use this link. Need advice? Ask me. I’ll get an affilliate fee, and will credit your account with me, to the value of £20 plus VAT. Domain names are best renewed through me, as I get 50% discount. I only charge you the cost price to me for domain registration and renewal anyway.

Face it! 80% of your web traffic will come via the search engines. Google is the major player, and with Yahoo, MSN, and Excite, cover 95% of searches. The other 1000’s of engines don’t figure. Believe me.

Since it’s a search engine game, from the start your site should be constructed to be as attractive as possible. A perfect SE homepage, would be all text (about 300 words) plus a small graphic, and boring text links. Note some text on sites - the fancier stuff - is actually a graphic. Check. Put the mouse over this text. A vertical line shows it is ‘proper text’. Put it over the logo text at the top and you’ll see it’s a graphic. See a graphic-based homepage done for this site. It was mostly invisible to Google, and only saved by the text at the bottom. Style costs.

Using our site as an example, say ‘restaurant’ and website’ are some of my chosen popular SE words. I should put those keywords in the text as much as possible. Within reason - do not over-stuff!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a black art. A bit like Michelin; no one actually knows what it takes to get stars, but everyone has a theory.

SEO does attract scamsters, so beware! Generally don’t go there. The search engines are also great at ‘moving the goal posts’, viz. Google sitemaps. Every time I revise your site I submit special files to Google for indexing.

Remembering that ‘web site’ too should be in there as an alternative spelling. Also, the page names, titles, headings, description, alt and title tags should basically be full of ‘website, design, web site’. Not over-stuffed or the SE folk will smell a rat.

The search engines run programs called ‘spiders’ who race from link to link, from site to site, around the net looking and checking. They do like you better if other sites - preferably big quality sites - link to yours. But that takes considerable time - talk to people you do business with, tourist boards, etc. And an automatic delay of about six months for SE listing, seems built in. That also, helps them sell you ‘sponsored links’ which Google calls ‘Adwords’. You set a max. amount you pay and if you don’t get outbid, will appear either at the side of page one results, or best, at the top. When a punter clicks your link you pay. Simple, and very cost effective. I reckon it is essential!  Usually about £40 to set up.