The main reasons for having a website are to:

1. act as your calling card and present your image
2. give information about your business
3. bring in new business
4. save on your marketing costs

We think that 3. and 4. are the most important .

When we put up a website we don't just stick it up like a postcard on a notice board. We believe it should be found by strangers who don't know of the existence of your site but need your service and will seek you out by means of a search engine of which the main ones are Google, MSN and Yahoo.

As soon as we post up your site we notify the search engines of your site's existence.

After your site has been listed, it has to be found in search. When people look at search results they usually look no further than the first or second page of 10 results each. Now try this experiment. Click on the MSN search above using the search term ‘Marlow bed breakfast’.

The first thing you'll notice is that there are about 10,000 results and you're not going to look through them all! Especially if you can find what you want on the first page.

Now, look at the individual results and you'll probably find that about 8 out of 10 results on the first page are from websites which we've put up. These sites are getting business through MSN search which has 21% of the search market in Europe. We can demonstrate success with other search engines too. Try the following searches:

Search for these websites:	Try searching using these keywords
www.bedbreakfastmarlow.co.uk	B&B Marlow Marlow guesthouse bed breakfast Marlow
www.azaleahouse.co.uk	B&B Henley on Thames Henley guesthouse bed breakfast Henley
www.squirrelhouse.co.uk	B&B High Wycombe High Wycombe guesthouse bed breakfast High Wycombe
www.amershambandb.co.uk	B&B Amersham Amersham guesthouse bed breakfast Amersham

Clearly these results did not happen by chance but by design, a process called search engine optimisation or SEO. We employ many techniques:

• Sites written in good code. We use HTML 4.01 strict!
• Well thought out headers
• Good choice of keywords
• Correct placement and frequency of keywords
• Relevant content
• Links into and out of your website (we provide 20+ in and we advise you on how to find others)

Our SEO techniques are ‘white hat’ i.e. those which search engines like and approve of. We do not use ‘black hat' techniques such as link farms and invisible writing to conceal ‘spamming' which can result in sites being banned if found out.

We keep an eye on the ranking of your site and tweak here and there to get improvement.

You may find, after a while, that you can afford to reduce your marketing spend elsewhere.