This month I decided to enter the term ‘granite worktops’ into Google and have a look at the website that came top of the unpaid listing to see what they are getting right – because they are undoubtedly getting their search engine optimisation (SEO) right or they wouldn’t be there.

Top of the list when I looked was granite4less.co.uk, which is also high on the first page of Jeeves and Yahoo.

There is going to be a lot of competition among companies wanting to head the first page for something like ‘granite worktops’, so how are granite4less doing it?

If you look at the site you might well wonder what is special about it. It has some strange language, talking about “granite marbles” and “graceful granite stuff for your kitchen as our Granite Supplier are eager to supply fabulous Granite Worktops stuff to you”. And the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) suggests you should get in touch with Natural Stone Direct – it does not say which of the sites Google throws up if you enter that term you should choose.

Clearly the promise of low prices will be attractive to customers and clearly granite4less has been around a while, presumably satisfying customers, in order to reach the top of Google’s list.

It is probably just me, but personally I would never buy from a site that provides no contact address (although it lists more than 50 UK counties and regions that it covers) and invites enquiries and orders via an 0871 premium rate national number. I could not find a company name or number, either (there being no company called Granite4less registered with Companies House).

Of course, there are plenty of companies who are using online expertise to reach the top of search engine lists to obtain orders that are fulfilled by other companies. And there are plenty of companies happy enough to take orders wherever they are directed from.

So how did granite4less get to the top of the list? The answer is: because whoever is managing the site has a good understanding of SEO.

The key phrases of the site – the words they are targeting for searches – are granite worktops, kitchen worktops and granite suppliers. They will have chosen those phrases after researching the number of times the terms are used in searches, which will be high. Look at the sitemap and you will see these terms repeated over and over. They often also appear in bold, which used to add weight to Google’s assessment of their importance but may not do so any more (search engine algorithms change over time while always remaining top secret).

The trump card of granite4Less is its work in securing links with other sites. Google loves links and granite4less has a lot. The name appears in many online directories, local as well as national, general (yell.co.uk) as well as industry based (build.co.uk) and even the international directory Dmoz, which Google is particularly fond of.

They are also in RIBA’s Product Selector and appear on many review sites. They post to forums. They are on Youtube and Facebook and they tweet. They post press releases to online press release sites such as PRfire and PRlog. This is all good stuff for moving up the search engine listings.

Website information company Alexa records links to 319 sites. You have to interpret Alexa information carefully but, nevertheless, that is phenomenally more than most stone companies achieve.

I cannot rate the overall site highly but you have to take your hat off to whoever is in charge of SEO. Thanks to that boost, I give this site a 79% rating overall.