About Me
As a Freelance SEO Consultant, I have been providing SEO Marketing Services helping clients improve their websites performance since 1998. Back then it was a lot easier. There were far fewer sites, keywords were easier to focus on and a lot less competitive and the search engines such as Alta Vista and Yahoo were much easier to submit to and get decent rankings from.
Since then the search engines have got a lot smarter about who they want at the top of their results pages. As a user you want the best results possible from Google et.al. for the words you type in. You do not want sites that do not answer your question, provide low quality information or are full of advertising.
There is no single A-Z ruleset that will guarantee you success. There is a constant sea of change in getting good rankings and a lot of the work is down to constantly trying something new, tweaking it and measuring the results to see what produces the best outcome.
To get good results requires regular, well focussed and targeted effort both on the site and external to it such as link building and monitoring the quality of the links. It is not possible to rank a site overnight and keep it there. With so many businesses developing great websites, it is no longer an optional marketing tool; it is an essential one with correct keyword ranking and search engine indexing central to success.
My Skills
Founder’s Profile
- Name – Jerry Leach
- Location – UK
- Academic – MBA
I have a long track record in the IT industry and have successfully built and sold a number of companies including –
- Internet Hosting
- IT and Computer Rental
- Online Publishing
- Computer Maintenance
A number of years ago I started a business – which is a pure online self-publishing service for authors and an online bookstore. This required building a website with millions of products (the books) in different categories and having them updated daily. To compete and win business we needed to get the website ranked really well in Google so that when a potential customer searched for a particular book, author or category then the site was going to be on page 1.
Initially we decided to outsource the SEO work as we wanted to concentrate on building the business. This was a big mistake and set us back many months on getting good rankings. The site was a complex, database driven site and there were big problems that were not identified by the different SEO company’s we used. These problems were blocking the search engines from properly crawling the site.
None of the SEO companies discussed the issues of optimising millions of pages either, a percentage of which were changing daily. Their focus was purely on the home page and a few simple keywords. So, some months after launching the site and not seeing the activity we were expecting we reviewed our SEO structure and decided to bring the work back and do it in house.
So, using the many years of experience we already had with smaller sites we turned our attention to optimising our own site. I then decided to take this and offer a top quality, focussed set of SEO services to companies with smaller sites and those with large product driven ecommerce sites as a freelance SEO consultant, delivering solid and repeatable results for them.
A little about me – Entrepreneur; Businessman; Engineer.
I started life as an electronics engineer with GEC Marconi (remember them!). I worked on studying Nuclear Explosions and what effect they had on your bits (electronic!).
I moved into the oil industry and worked in the Seismic industry on ships charting for oil and looking after the data logging and navigation equipment. I left after spending time in Angola in 1978 and being shot at in their civil war.
I have watched and participated in the birth and growth of the PC industry in all its forms. I worked on a prototype ‘laptop’ in 1975 – a computer in a brief case.
I spent a few years in the City of London during the mid-80’s in the finance sector – most of it in wine bars as was the custom then.
I have started and successfully built and sold a number of companies. Server World provided Managed server hosting and hosted products (Exchange and SharePoint) from its own data centre. STRS an equipment rental business provided short term hire of PC’s, displays and all forms of technology for exhibitions, training courses and conferences. Previous to that I built a PC maintenance company providing national onsite maintenance.
I have an MBA from the Open University. I have been involved with the Internet and Websites optimisation since 1998. Back then it was pretty straight forward. Competition was much less and it was mostly run by Alta Vista and Yahoo. Just scatter a few good keywords around and you would be ranking on page one. However, as the Internet has grown, search engines have had to constantly improve and change the way they decide where a website should be in their index.
Google is now by far the biggest player with well over 80% of the searches and results provided by their search engine so this is where a lot of focus has to fall currently. I have always found it a rewarding and interesting challenge to work on a website and improve its rankings and traffic. There is no ‘rule book’ just a lot of pieces of information which put together in different ways will give you different results. It is a little like Chess or Bridge, an intellectual challenge where you never know what your opponent will do next. Only in this case your opponent is Google or Bing etc.