Search Engine Optimisation

Most of us in the business world believe that by just creating a website and putting it out there, internet users will search and find the unique products and services that we have to offer. This is not the case. In comes Search Engine Optimisation.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines, by effectively marketing your site to a local or global audience.

Visit a search engine and type in a few keywords like “property valuation”. You will be immediately presented with thousands of results organized in a ranking that takes up several pages. Each page will contain between 10 and 100 results, depending on the search engine you use and your preferences. How many of those search engine results are you going to glance through? The first 100, which would be around 10 search result pages? Probably not! The first 30 or 3 search result pages are more likely. Some search engine users won’t even go past the first 10 results.

So how do you effectively market your website? There is no ‘ace up your sleeve’ that you can use to boost a website up to the first positions. If there was one, everybody would use it, the search engines would realize about it and they would ban it, or it would become obsolete due to saturation. Instead, ranking success comes from taking several steps at the right moment and in the appropriate manner. These steps are an ever-changing science and a full-time job. Once the frameworks have been implemented, it requires constant update and research in an aim to satisfy the human user and the search engine world.

This means that just because a website is listed in the engines it doesn’t mean that it will be found.

You could opt to use one of those convenient search engine submission tools that will submit a site to a thousand search engine for very little money. Nevertheless, when tested, these techniques proved to be of little help and, sometimes even spoiled good web site positions and attracted “spam”.

By using Web Positioning strategies, both paid and organic, we attempt to give the search engines what they want and need in order to find a site among those thousands of websites. When a site is submitted to one of the several search engines, the engine
Immediately sends a “spider” to visit it. The spider is a complex piece of software, administered by the search engines that will “catalogue”, or “index”, the words on the website in order to use the words to rank the page. Therefore, the ultimate goal of Web positioning is to create “spider friendly” pages that will enhance the web site’s position on the engine’s ranking, to consequently, obtain more traffic.

This, combined with an effective design, good website coding practices, easy navigation and good product/service marketing, is what it takes to create a successful online business.

BEWARE

Please consider the following points when selecting an online marketing firm:

• NO ONE can guarantee a number one position. This is a rule stipulated by Google and the other major search players.
• As a general rule if the optimisation firm is uncomfortable giving you information regarding the basics of their services be wary of their techniques and “know-how”. Obviously no professional will give away their trade secrets but an un-transparent firm is generally a “shady firm”
• Always select a firm that will throughout the campaign send you progress reports. How can you pay for something without seeing the result?

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