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Hi Leanne,
I hope Andrew doesn't mind me jumping in but I do a bit of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for various small businesses and professionals. Firstly, everything he said was true (as always!). Hosting isn't usually strongly related to search engine results but, if it puts your mind at rest, I can confirm that I host multiple sites with Nethosted and they get great results.
Secondly, as Andrew implied, there is really no such thing as guaranteed results when it comes to search engines. Be very wary of anyone who says otherwise. The good news is that getting reasonable results is not actually that difficult once you've learnt the basics. Getting excellent results is more difficult and takes practice and reading up - there is a lot to SEO and PPC. But don't be disheartened since sorting out the basics might be all that you need for now. I do recommend talking to a professional who could talk you through exactly what you need to do to achieve what you want - you'll find it to be more cost effective in the long run - but if you want to go it alone then here are a few pointers:
1. Good search engine results depend upon many things but the most important is the text that you put on your site and how you "format" that text in HTML. Put yourself in the mind of your customer and think about what words they would put into a search engine to find your business. Those are the words you need on the site. Make sure they are mentioned multiple times, inside well written useful, relevant content. Use Headings (use HTML H1, H2, H3 tags to mark them up) and paragraphs to break up your text and make it easy to read. Use emphasis (i.e. bold) on the most important words. Keep massive images, Flash animation, and whizzy effects to a minimum.
2. Inbound links - submit your site to free online UK business directories. Don't pay for this service. One example is: . Google other websites that list businesses like yours and submit the details.
3. Create a Google Local Business listing. This really works well. It's free.
4. Use Google AdWords. This is PPC advertising and a whole new ball game in itself but it is very effective, can be very cheap, and not really that hard to use if you don't mind putting in a couple of hours of effort, and reading the online help. A couple of businesses I know use Google AdWords to get virtually all their new customers, so I know it works and I strongly recommend it. In fact, if you use this you can worry less about building a perfect website with great content and getting great rankings in the free search engine results (not fully but that's a whole topic in itself).
5. If you really get into this and want to ask questions and get great help on everything to do with SEO and PPC, and indeed any other website development questions then go here:
Do some reading and you'll get some great tips. It's full of friendly, highly experienced web developers and business people who are doing SEO and PPC on a daily basis so some discussions can get very technical but if you can get past that daunting aspect then there is very valuable information on that site.
Right, I'm going to stop there. There's loads more things I could have mentioned but I run the risk of overloading you. I've probably gone too far already but hey ho... Hope that helps. Ask away if I've confused you at all.
Rich
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