A firm selling precious fossils has unearthed a gigantic turnover after bringing its prehistoric website into the 21st century. Three years ago Fossil Farm director Jonathan Dempsey was earning an annual £1,000 from his bedroom ‘office’. Now the rock n’ relic loving business man has hit a money mine, making £250,000 last year shipping Jurassic gems and Cretaceous crystals worldwide from his East Sussex warehouse.

The secret to Jonathan’s success, he believes, is search engine optimisation – a system of selecting key words and phrases to move a business website to the top of the results pages during an internet search. Fossil enthusiast, Jonathan says:

"I was contacted by FirstFound who wanted to update my website by optimising it. Prior to that, if you searched for fossils to buy, Fossil Farm was nowhere to be found unless you trawled through about 200 pages! "

"Even though I was only trading via EBay at that time, the ‘organic optimisation’ package FirstFound were offering was completely affordable. "

"Within the first month of it being done I sold £2,000 worth of fossils. Before that it had taken a year to make half of that. "

What sets Jonathan apart from his competitors is the fact he and a handful of contractors, mine for fossils themselves. They are sold mainly to museums, learning institutions and private collectors. "It is quite hard to find fossils in our country because we don’t have great big river systems like Canada or America. We are such a small country and everything is built on, so you are really at the mercy of when people are building roads or doing drainage work or building a housing estate, to get in there quickly and mine."