Martin Malden here - thanks for visiting!


Martin Malden

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What My Customers Are Saying:


Nigel Saywell-Lee, Managing Director, Statura Ltd.:

"He was involved in the feasibility study of OSS for a major telco in Indonesia. Martin's insight was complete and secured that operators future..."

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David Goldstein, COO EMTEK Group:

"...Martin has the unique combination of true operational experience and the broad exposure of having successfully worked on a wide range of consultancy projects.."

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Al Beebe, Principal at PRTM:

"...He is a true industry expert, intelligent, and -- most importantly -- a great team player. Martin is a pleasure to work with..."

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Eric Buckley, IT Director, Wellness Travel Company

"...Martin provided a valuable service in helping us get our Web Sites positioned well on the Internet. But he also went that extra step to make our Management Staff understand how and why, and in simple terms..."

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I build standards-compliant websites

Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional



search engine optimisation services


Search Engine Optimisation

  • Generate Lots of Free Traffic to Your Site
  • Let Future Customers Find You Easily
  • Reduce Marketing and Promotion Costs

The objective of Search Engine Optimisation is to ensure that a website is as clearly visible to the search engines as possible.


Black ArtMany people would love you to believe that Search Engine Optimisation is some form of black art.

Don't believe them!

It's not. But in any case, you're far better off concentrating on the quality of the content on your site than on whatever the search engines may think of it.

To make your business successful you need to focus on your business. Not the search engines!

The search engines all see their mission as providing the most relevant results possible to people searching for information on the Internet.


Google LogoGoogle has been particularly successful in this and, over the past several years, has raised the bar continuously on the quality of search results by focusing on relevance.

Relevance is the term used to mean that a search result is totally relevant to what the searcher was looking for.

In order to achieve high rankings for their sites in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), many webmasters started attempting to analyse the search engine algorithms and then adjust their websites to meet what they thought were the Search engines' criteria.

This led to web pages and web sites being written for the search engines, rather than for real people, and many of these sites read very badly to the average viewer as a result.black hat techniques

This desire to rank well in the SERPS also resulted in the development of 'black hat' SEO techniques.

These are techniques that are developed in order to deliberately fool the search engines into believing the site in question is highly relevant to the search.

As a result of these two trends the search engines now continually fine-tune and adjust their search algorithms. Their purpose in doing this is two-fold:

  1. To continually improve the relevance of the search results they provide to searchers
  2. To negate the efforts of the 'black hat' SEO specialists.

Search Engine Optimisation is, therefore, a dynamic environment.


Which is why it's important to focus on your business. If you try to keep up with the search engines you'll spend all your time focusing on that - to the detriment of your business.

A change of algorithm by one of the major search engines can have a dramatic effect on search results placings, particularly in the short term.

Graph showing variable trendSo a site that is ranking very well prior to a change may suddenly drop significantly in the search results after a change of algorithm, even if the site was highly professionally built and optimised, and highly relevant to the search.

Usually these changes stabilise after a week or so as further tweaks to the algorithm are implemented.

Today, the importance of relevance in search engine results means that there are three points that it's important to achieve in optimising a website for the search engines:

  1. Good quality, frequently updated content that the search engine spiders can easily find and read
  2. Correct use of the accepted standards (META tags) to effectively tell the search engines about the site and its content
  3. A high number of incoming links from good quality sites in the same or similar industry categories to the site in question

There are other factors that are taken into account, mostly related to those points - but focusing on those 3 areas as a starting point forms the foundation of a well optimised website.

Steps that can be taken


Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) broadly falls into 2 categories:

  1. On page (or site) SEO
  2. Off page SEO

On page SEO relates to how a website is set up, the content it contains and how effectively that content is displayed to the search engines.

Off page SEO relates to what the Internet at large 'thinks' of the site. This is mostly determined by the number and type of links that a site attracts.

Any website SEO project must address both on page and off page SEO to be effective.

I've written a series of articles on Search Engine Optimisation - you can find them here.

Contact Me


For more on how I can help to optimise your site for the search engines:

Call me on: +852 9238 9998

Or...

Email Me.

And, for some more information...

Check out my blog: click here.