SilverDisc On-line Digital Marketing

About SilverDisc – What Sets Us Apart?

SilverDisc is a digital agency with a track record of getting it right for our clients. We’re based in Kettering, Northamptonshire and our technology division is in Santiago, Chile. What sets us apart?

We’ve been around for a long time, since before the Web and well before Google and Facebook. Founded in 1993 to develop marketing applications on compact disc (hence our name), we quickly got online. We were running our first web server in 1994 for our client, HarperCollins, and in 1995 we helped Barclays to develop the first online banking service. Later in 1995 we began search marketing with the launch of AltaVista. We began PPC marketing in 2001 and social media marketing in 2006. When it comes to the Web, we’ve been there, seen it, done it – we even have an original Google t-shirt.

We’re a marketing company, of course, but we’re a marketing company founded by technologists. This means we have a deep and broad understanding of the whole ecosystem in which our marketing is operating, including issues such as scalability, stability and security. It’s no good sending visitors to a website that is slow or has fallen over or been hacked.

In 1999 SilverDisc’s founder Alan Perkins filed two patents covering some very fundamental search engine ground, including crawling and indexing of the web and personalisation of search results – both still hot topics today, and used by amongst others Google! Both patents were granted and have been successfully licensed. We continue to use their principles and processes in the systems and tools we run for our clients.

In 2001 Alan was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. The theme of the session was “cloaking and doorways” and he had travelled half way around the world, at his own expense, to spend twelve minutes telling the audience (who had themselves paid to travel and learn about cloaking and doorways) why they shouldn’t in fact use these unethical techniques. Frankly, he wondered what he was doing there! But in the audience were people from Google, who liked not only what Alan had to say but also how he said it, in a way that laid out long term principles rather than detailed technical guidelines. Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, made contact with Alan and, as a result, two of Alan’s principles made their way into Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They are still there today. Matt Cutts says:

Our discussions helped to clarify the guidelines and the thinking behind them; we’d been batting around similar ideas within Google, but hearing the same things being said from outside Google was very helpful to know that we were on the same page as other smart people.

As online marketing goes, there are very few who can claim our heritage, reputation and kudos.