Q: How do you think you can help a company without a website?
A: We also run a business and understand the challenges of communicating our message to our customers. Our focus is on business solutions that turn complex technology into benefits that our customers can understand.

Q: How do you know what is right for a customer's website design?
A: We spend a large amount of time on any project discovering what is it our customer's really do. This means understanding what the features, functions and benefits of what they sell? We do not just develop websites we are seeking long term partnerships - so we have to fullly understand our customers - then we can communicate that fully on the Internet.

Q: What is it that makes your company different?
A: We are driven by a passion for excellance in everything we do. We are open minded to every opportunity and new ways of thinking.

Q: What procedures do you have in place for Data Protection?
A: We fully comply with the Data Protection Act and our company is registered uner that Act.

Q: How does Inktomi work?
A: Inktomi provide the database that services many popular search engines, MSN, Hotbot and Looksmart to name a few. In this respect Inktomi is an important place to get listed in. For an annual charge Inktomi will guarantee a re-indexing of the page every 48 hours. This ensures that such pages are constantly present in the index. Pages can still be submitted for free, but it is highly likely that they will drop out of the database within a week, if indexed at all. We believe that the minimal yearly cost is well compensated by a constant presence in all the many search engines and portals that Inktomi serve.

Q: Why do I get different results in the search engines to the ones on your report for our website?
A: There are a number of possible reasons. You may be seeing results which are customised for your locality - for instance Yahoo serves different results to UK and US users. Our reports show the positions as listed in the engines without any regional variations, as we find this provides the most accurate picture internationally.

Q: My report says my site is showing in the top 30 using a certain keyword, but when I put in that keyword my site is nowhere to be found.
A: Search engines can regularly drop sites from their index. Your site may have been dropped from the index after the report was created. To compensate for this behaviour you need to ensure that the Search Engine Optimisation programme you choose resubmits your site to all search engines on a regular basis. Every engine is different.

Q: Why is it necessary to 'maintain' my campaign?
A: In addition to building a campaign around keyword phrases, search engine promotion is an ongoing necessity as search engines are forever changing their ranking methods and refreshing their databases. Once a position has been obtained in an index it must be maintained and, wherever possible, improved. Without maintenance your site position will deteriorate and drop out of the top 30 positions and frequently out of the index altogether.

Q: What is 'stealth' or 'ghost page' promotion?
A: 'Stealth' promotion uses special programming techniques to serve one set of pages to the search engine indexing program, and another to normal users. This practice is considered as unacceptable practice by search engines and is, as such, a high risk strategy. Sites discovered using this technique are usually removed from the index altogether, occasionally being banned for life. Spokespeople from a number of top search engines have publicly stated that web sites caught practising 'stealth' technology will be banned for life - most top search engines are actively involved in developing anti-stealth technology. For these critical reasons, VHS does not employ stealth technology - we are confident that our promotion techniques are thoroughly researched and proven to deliver top placements without compromising your sites long-term status within the search engines.

Q: Why is Yahoo different from other Directories? Why is my site not listed on Yahoo?
A: Yahoo is notoriously choosy about adding new sites to its directory. Sites have to measure up to its stringent quality standards and poor designs are seldom accepted. Submissions in highly competitive categories are particularly difficult, and a site is more likely to be listed if it is the only one of its kind.

Q: Why should I pay to get into some search engines?
A: Our research shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult for sites to get into Yahoo using the free submission service. Additionally there is no longer any free listing service for Looksmart. Unfortunately both these 'paid for' services only guarantee a review (usually within a week) with no guarantee of a listing. We recommend that all clients undertake both Yahoo and Looksmart services for the following, very important reasons. In terms of increasing targeted visitors, both engines are VERY important. Yahoo is consistently in the top 10 visited sites on the net. Looksmart claims to reach over 55% of the UK online population, influencing popular UK search sites such as MSN and Excite. For a relatively small once-off fee your site will end up reaching far more people in the long run. Both sites, especially Yahoo, carry a significant amount of 'kudos'. Sites listed on these engines are generally seen by searchers as well established. In technical terms, through a process called 'link popularity', listings on these directories will, to a certain extent, boost your search ratings on other search engines. Search engines measure link popularity by quantity of links and also by the QUALITY of these links. Therefore a link from Yahoo will favourably contribute to a web site's link popularity and search rankings. Charges will become the norm in the near future, it is important to get into as many key search engines as possible before your competitors do.

Q: Why is my site ranked highly in one engine but not in another?
A: Each engine uses a different set of criteria to calculate your site's position relative to a search phrase. Search engines are very secretive about how they achieve this and are constantly changing their 'qualifying' rules.

Q: Why are some of my keywords not listed?
A: This can be caused by a number of factors. Some keywords, for instance 'discount CDs' are more competitive than others. Because of this, we employ a rigorous keyword research plan at the beginning of the promotion to help you choose keywords which are targeted and have a good chance of appearing in the top few pages of results. Some engines also limit the number of pages listed per site to keep the size of their indices down and will only include pages optimised for some of your keywords. You will also find your site is probably listed for fewer keywords in the directories than it is in the indices.

Q: Why do rankings sometimes go down?
A: Occasionally search engines change the algorithm they use to rank search results. Furthermore, some engines tend to weight rankings in favour of newly submitted sites. For these reasons our specialist search engine promoter regularly checks the rankings of your site, and will re-optimise your pages if an engines algorithm significantly changes. At VHS we also resubmit your site regularly to the engines, so it always appears fresh.

Q: What keywords should I choose for my promotion?
A: It is obviously very important to choose the key words that you think your potential audience may use to try and find you. These should be relevant to the content of the site, and as specific as possible. Our experience has shown that people are using more targeted phrases to search. For example 'sailing holiday travel agents' will have much shorter list of relevant list of results than 'travel'. We will work closely with you to determine the key phrases that will get the best results for both you, and your customers.

Q: Which search engines should I register with and why?
A: Over 90% of all search engine traffic is driven through the top 15 engines, and for most sites this will provide the most cost-effective solution. Our standard service targets these engines, but if your site has a specialist audience and you wish to target a specific engine, we will be happy to quote.

Q: How long does it take for my site to get listed?
A: The length of time varies from engine to engine. The indices are indexing millions of new sites every day, as well as checking the integrity of sites already listed. In our experience, this means it can take from one to 12 weeks before a newly submitted site shows up in the listings.

Q: Why should I use a bespoke service instead of using free software to submit to thousands of search engines?
A: Such free software will submit your site to thousands of search engines but will not help you achieve good rankings and will not optimise your site for individual search engines. Here we will optimise your pages both for the keywords you wish to be found for, and for the engines we target. It is important to keep in mind that the engines we target account for a very hihg proportion of all search engine traffic. Our service maintains high search engine rankings generating significant amounts of 'targeted' traffic to your site.

Q: Why do some sites rank more highly than others?
A: The search engines use a complex set of algorithms to rate the relevance of each page. Factors which they take into account include the presence of keywords in the content, the page titles and meta tags. Other criteria, such as site popularity, can also affect the ranking.

Q: What are meta tags?
A: A meta tag is a section of a web page which is invisible in a browser but readable by the search engine indexing 'spiders'. The tags contain a description of the page and a list of relevant keywords. The search engines use this information to help categorise and rank the page in their indices.

Q: What is the difference between a directory and an index?
A: A directory is maintained by human editors who vet submitted sites and organise them into categories. Yahoo is the most well known directory. Programs called spiders, which crawl the Internet, indexing content automatically, maintain an index such as AltaVista.

Q: What are keywords?
A: Keywords are terms used by people looking for web site via search engines. So if someone searching for a site enters the keyword phrase 'UK estate agents' the search engine will produce a list of sites which match these criteria.

Q: What is P3P?
A: The full name for P3P is the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. P3P 1.0 is an official "recommendation" of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that was approved in April 2002. P3P provides a standard way for Web sites to encode their privacy policies in a computer-readable XML format. This allows P3P-enabled Web browsers and other P3P user agents to fetch P3P privacy policies automatically, parse them, and compare them with a user's privacy preferences. P3P user agents can use the information in a P3P policy to provide a summarized version of Web site privacy policies to users. For example, IE6 offers a Privacy Report option from the View menu, and Netscape 7 includes a Privacy Summary button on its Page Info screen. The AT&T Privacy Bird is a free Internet Explorer add-on that puts a bird icon in the corner of a user's browser window. The bird changes color to indicate whether or not a site's P3P policy matches the user's preferences. Users can also click on the bird to get a summary of a site's privacy policy.

Q: What are cookies and what are the riskes with them?
A: The WWW is built on a very simple, but powerful premise. All material on the Web is formatted in a general, uniform format called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and all information requests and responses conform to a similarly standard protocol. When someone accesses a server on the Web, such as the Library of Congress, the user's Web browser will send an information request to the Library of Congress' computer. This computer is called a Web server. The Web server will respond to the request by transmitting the desired information to the user's computer. There, the user's browser will display the received information on the user's screen. Cookies are pieces of information generated by a Web server and stored in the user's computer, ready for future access. Cookies are embedded in the HTML information flowing back and forth between the user's computer and the servers. Cookies were implemented to allow user-side customization of Web information. For example, cookies are used to personalize Web search engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide contests (but only once!), and to store shopping lists of items a user has selected while browsing through a virtual shopping mall. Essentially, cookies make use of user-specific information transmitted by the Web server onto the user's computer so that the information might be available for later access by itself or other servers. In most cases, not only does the storage of personal information into a cookie go unnoticed, so does access to it. Web servers automatically gain access to relevant cookies whenever the user establishes a connection to them, usually in the form of Web requests. Cookies are based on a two-stage process. First the cookie is stored in the user's computer without their consent or knowledge. For example, with customizable Web search engines like My Yahoo!, a user selects categories of interest from the Web page. The Web server then creates a specific cookie, which is essentially a tagged string of text containing the user's preferences, and it transmits this cookie to the user's computer. The user's Web browser, if cookie-savvy, receives the cookie and stores it in a special file called a cookie list. This happens without any notification or user consent. As a result, personal information (in this case the user's category preferences) is formatted by the Web server, transmitted, and saved by the user's computer. During the second stage, the cookie is clandestinely and automatically transferred from the user's machine to a Web server. Whenever a user directs her Web browser to display a certain Web page from the server, the browser will, without the user's knowledge, transmit the cookie containing personal information to the Web server.

Q: What Are The Chances of Catching a Virus From a Cookie?
A: A normal text based cookie cannot be of any danger to your computer or spread any viruses. Whether or not other cookies can be dangerous or spread viruses has to do with whether or not a file is "executable," meaning if it's a program rather than data. UNIX files, for instance, have some combination of the properties "readable," "writable" and "executable." The executable property is necessary to enable a program in a file to do something. If a cookie is not stored in an executable format for that platform, it cannot do something hostile. Most cookies are not executable, and we have not come across one. In general Cookies are stored as text files and cannot be of danger or pass on viruses. Even if a cookie is executable it cannot automatically spread on a virus unless you execute it. But of course with bugs in earlier verions of Internet Explorer, it will let a site run a application. In theory, if a executable cookie was set with malicious contents, then it is possible that IE3.0 could execute it, then it could affect your computer with a virus. The maximum contents of a cookie is 4Kb, and the line to delete the contents of a hard-disk is only 18 bytes long, so obviously the virus could do some damage even though it could not be a complete Trojan horse. Please note this is only a theory and we have never heard of a a cookie that was able to spread a virus, this would be virtually impossible, and would take a great deal of work. This theory is trivial compared to some other very real loopholes in the net. A loophole in ActiveX was demonstrated, and was able to access the underlying file system. There has also been some security problems uncovered in Java. Basically cookies cannot harm your computer. The general controversy is not what cookies can do to your computer, but what information they can store, and what they can pass on to servers, there is currently a new proposal to limit the features of the cookie protocol, which would give people a greater control over what cookies they can accept and from where.

Q: How long will it take for my domain name to show up on the internet when we transfer or host with you?
A: It will take between 24-48 hours for DNS propagation. DNS Propagation is the process by which the computers on the Internet update their records (DNS tables) to reflect new domain names & site name(s). When your domain name has propagated throughout the Internet, your domain name can be accessed and recognized on the Internet. Please note: It may take approximately 24-48 hours for a domain name transfer, or registration. During this time their may be a loss of web site and email service.