In February 2010, www.milsomhotels.com had 2,547 online search references. Over the last three months we have successfully more than tripled this amount to 9,610 search references. This was achieved through online press and article distribution.

The strategy is twofold, to increase brand awareness online but also to create a greater number of channels for search engines to find, index and cache the site. A spider’s web would be a good analogy for the way in which SEO works. Search Engines only spend a millisecond trawling a site, and not all the pages are searched – so by creating thousands of access points for search engines we can increase time on site, and visibility.

Links from other websites are critical for creating the impression of an authoritative website and increasing search engine listings for search terms. For example, the search term ‘Suffolk Hotel’, the website appeared on page 32 or 320th position when a user typed Suffolk Hotel into their computer. By building links from relevant, high page rank websites using the term Suffolk Hotel as an anchor text, we can get search engines to begin to equate the words ‘Suffolk Hotel’ to Milsom Hotels and Restaurants (Search Term rankings detailed below).

In February, Milsom Hotels and Restaurants were appearing past page 5 in 23 of their 32 primary search terms. In 3 months, Standout have brought all of the primary search terms within 5 search result pages, within the first 50 search results. One search term was increased phenomenally from page 50 to page 4! To continue such an incredible progression in the discoverabilty of the site, we are now targeting the higher traffic search terms to further deliver greater quantities of interested traffic to both of Milsom Hotel’s key digital properties.