For people who are looking for a specific product or service people using the Internet will often use search engines. There are a couple of routes to achieve good search engine rankings.

Google has a pay per click service. This will allow you to display your advert on the right hand side of the screen in a blue box. You will then be charged an amount per click through from Google. To stop the costs spiraling out of control you can set up a maximum amount you are willing to spend per day. When you hit the specified amount, your advert will be taken off for the rest of the day. It will appear the following day until the limit is hit. This is effective but can work out quite expensive too. If you are bidding on popular keywords such as "law" one click through could cost you as much as £2-£5.

Zarr creates sites which are highly optimized for search engines, which we do on an ongoing basis as part of our hosting and support service. Some specific techniques we would develop your site to include would be:

1. Develop integration of the website with Google Sitemaps which will ensure that all of your web pages will be picked up by Google within a short space of time (days rather than months), rather than Google having to "find" all the pages on your website. You can find out more about this very new way of search engine techniques here.
2. Optimized site. We develop the site to be quick to load, have the necessary ALT tags, and meta tags and other things/criteria that search engines aimed at improving search engine ranking for sites.
3. Giving you the tools to optimize your site yourself through Zarr’s content management system, which allows you enter your own page titles and meta keywords and meta descriptions on each individual web page, which optimizes your web pages for search engines. You can also update the contents on the web pages yourself, and frequent updates are liked by search engines.

The above techniques are included as part of the development costs for the site, and the ongoing host and support costs. Zarr creates websites to be optimized for search engines but this doesn’t automatically guarantee you top listings for your chosen key terms. The techniques we use do have good results but it takes time and we cannot guarantee it.

To get guaranteed top listings you would need to pay Google and Yahoo to become a sponsored link on a pay per click basis and Zarr would work with you so that you could manage your own campaign. The way it works is that you bid on certain key terms and specify how much you are willing to spend per visitor who clicks through to your site on that term and a daily budget e.g. £10-£25.

Search engines have a mammoth task in continually re-visiting websites. Google as an example has over 4.5 billion pages in its index and despite its 10,000+ servers, takes time to index new website content.

With a new website, it could take up to 4-5 months to see proper results, although it is important to appreciate that there is no quick or overnight solution. If there was, everyone would be using it – and the person behind the solution would be extremely rich.