When a company wants to establish an online presence, they obviously need a home base, a website. To create one, companies can either pay to have professionals design custom sites or they can use a free website template. As you might expect, for smaller businesses that are new to the internet, a free website template is a temping proposition. After all, custom websites can cost hundreds, even thousands of pounds to create.

But we are here to tell you that that is often money well spent. The simple fact is that a simple website template cannot provide companies with the options and features they need to compete on the internet. Not to mention the fact that bland, dull websites are not what most online shoppers want or expect to see these days.

Professional web designers make a living creating stylish websites that are easy to use and are tailored to meet the needs of your customer base. To connect you with interested customers they use their knowledge of SEO . What is it? SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the way that customers find your website on the internet.

It begins when they search for a company in your field and the browser returns a search results page. This page includes a number of websites that are arranged according to their SEO ranking. The websites with the highest SEO rankings are obviously listed at or near the top of the page, while those with lower ranking appear on the bottom of the page.

The reason this is important is because shoppers are far more likely to visit and buy from websites that are listed at the top of the page. How can you improve your SEO ranking? Really, this is a job best left to the professionals. SEO involves a complex series of tricks and techniques and it is not a project for a rank (no pun intended) amateur.