Article by John Black

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it’s become known by, is an essential ingredient for any web site to be successful.  However it can be very puzzling for website owners particularly for those new to the whole concept of selling online .  There are usually 3 reactions the whole concept of SEO ;

1.  Some feel that it is a waste of time and that simply the act of putting a website on the web is enough.

2.  Some feel that they can just do it all themselves and that there isn’t much to it.

3.  Many feel that it is certainly something that should be delegated to a professional and that their valuable time is better spent doing things for their companies that they excel at.

All three perspectives have merit, for a few companies just having a website is sufficient.  The sort of business this would work for is one that is unlikely to have people searching for their services on the web.  For instance a personal Chiropractic practice in a reasonably tiny town.

In barely bigger cities, depending on the quantity of competing businesses have internet sites online, it may be possible to get great results by doing a bit of promotion yourself.

For the majority getting it to work fine really does need the services of a professional Search Engine Optimization expert.
Search engine optimisation is a field that is consistently changing and the systems and techniques that need to be used to get good search engine visibility are also an ever changing phenomenon.

the great thing about using Search Engine Optimisation to get your website to rank highly in the search engines is that it is advertising that not only is working for you twenty four hours a day, seven days each week.  It is a way of bringing in shoppers that are actively searching for what you are providing.

Consider the traditional kinds of advertising – paperspapers, mags, TV, local papers or radio.  They are all a sort of shotgun approach, sending your advertising far and wide in the hope that your future clients happen to be reading, watching or listening to them at precisely the right time.

While with search engine promoting it is simply possible with good SEO services and a well set up site, to put your offering directly in front of the folk that have purposely looked for your service by typing it into a search engine.

Another great thing about using search engine optimisation to lift your business, is that it is measurable.  Unlike more standard forms of advertising, it is entirely possible to track what quantity of folks come to your website.  Not just that you can tell where in the world they come from, which keyword phrase they used to find you, which search engine they came through and how many came thru each of the keywords.

with additional traditional advertising not only is it a shotgun approach, usually it isn’t quantifiable and typically the costs involved are extremely high.

For cutting edge SEO services at a fraction of the cost of other Search Engine Optimization services visit www.linxhurricane.com today

Should I optimise my new website for SEO or is the design more important? This is a question that will raise a lively debate but the company you keep will have a large bearing on the answer.

A graphic designer who specialises in visual design will debate that in a high percentage of cases that the website design is the priority of course. And let’s face it without that visually pleasant to the eye design a browser will navigate away from your site within a matter of seconds or so they lead you to believe. But then that raises an all together different debate of how did they find your site in the first instance?

The basic web design criteria or curve goes along the lines of visual design is storyboarded for client ..website design looks excellent let’s go for it. We need some content ok, Take the text from our existing old site…..website goes live and time passes but no visitors!

And then even more time passes by until eventually perhaps months and sometimes years later the situation is either so critical or the company are having to spend out on adwords that finally a search engine optimisation company gets called in or the sales manager starts to question the lack of inbound enquiries from the web, and before you know it you are investing in a web marketing strategy to try and achieve some search engine results.

Is this really the best way to go? The thousands of website owners that have followed this exact or similar path will certainly argue that it most definitely is not as this hope and pray web development criteria delays any websites success by unacceptable periods of time, and even more frightening  results in thousands in lost profit, turnover and ongoing prospect capture.

The search engines don’t care about what the site looks like but with no attention to SEO so often this initial chance to make the best impact when the site first gets indexed is totally wasted, if all the search engines find is a badly optimised site with little regard paid to any SEM requirements or keyword capture.

With only a little extra investment spent on pre development SEO ,for example keyword research and optimisation gives an worthy return on investment as invariably initial indexing is bound to achieve a far better search engine ranking from the beginning and it has been known for pre-optimised websites to hit a page one result straight away.

To find out more about search engine optimisation visit SEO Services Southampton .

Phew, this is a big subject and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are credible sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you receive their apparent trust and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s valuable to state some underhand sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous web pages – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but large press properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….