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The BTG and SEO

Dateline: 29th March, 2005

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, the process by which website owners try to get their sites as high in the search engine listings for their keywords as they can. If you were to go to Yahoo or Google and type in the words "British theatre", you'd get a list of millions of pages (3m on Google, 5m on Yahoo) and at the top of the list for both search engines, you'll get the BTG. That is the Holy Grail of SEO: to be the first, the top of the heap, the king of the hill.

Website owners often spend large sums to hire SEO experts - it can cost you £50 an hour just to talk to one! We didn't: we just built the site with as much relevant content as we possibly could, and we're adding to that relevant content every day. At the time of writing - and it will have gone up by the time you are reading this, because it doesn't, for example, include this page- we have 4,676 pages online. We are also rated 6/10 by Google, its assesment of the importance of the page. Also rated the same are the other big Brtish theatre sites such as What's Onstage, the Official London Theatre Guide and The Stage.

As a result, we get lots of emails from SEO experts asking us to link to their clients' sites, because Google, in particular, estimates a site's importance partly by the number of other sites linking to it and partly by the ranking of those linking sites. You would be amazed at the sites which request we link to them - sites for holidays in the UK, sites selling software, even the odd "adult" site. These emails almost always take the same form: they usually have the title "Link Submission" and tell us that their site is about to go flying up Google's results and we would benefit greatly from linking to them. They then tell us that they have already linked to us and that, to confirm that link, we should add a link to them - they give the exact wording they want - and then email them with the exact URL where their link can be found.

To all those SEO experts out there who want the BTG to link to them, please note - and we declare this in full view of our readers, for they deserve to know what it is they are letting themselves in for when they visit the BTG:

1. We only link to sites of British Theatre interest. If your site has no connection to British Theatre, your email will be ignored.
2. If your site is not of direct British Theatre interest but it does have some connection to the topic, we will visit it and, if we feel it will be of interest or use to our readers, we will list it.. If we don't, we won't!
3. We will not use your description of your site. We will visit it and look at every page (we do - every page!) and will write our own description.
4. We will list the site under the name which is on the front page of your site. We will not give it another name which might mislead potential visitors.
5. We will list the site on what we think, having visited it, is the most relevant links page (or pages, for some sites can fit into more than one category). We will not list it in what we feel to be an unsuitable category, no matter how much you may want us to.

In other words, we will not do anything which may tend to mislead our readers.

If, after all this, you still want a link to your site from the BTG, then you can pay us to carry a display advert, which is clearly an advert and cannot be confused with editorial copy.

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©Peter Lathan 2005