One of the key areas involved in my work with clients is Search Engine Optimisation often just referred to as SEO.
SEO is the collection of techniques used to ensure that websites can be found in the major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and now Bing, the new search engine from Miicrosoft.
With millions of websites and billions of pages currently online the likelihood of any single one being found by the right people is many times worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Search engines make finding websites appropriate to what people are looking for much easier. They use extremely sophisticated databases and search programs to match up search queries with websites that they deem relevant to the searcher. So, if you are a business using a website to market your business, search engines are vital to your survival and success.
Unfortunately, many small businesses seem either unaware of the importance of search engines to their business or they simply don’t know how to ensure that their websites are ‘findable’ by the search engines. In simple terms they need to make their websites Search Engine Friendly!
Over the years many systems have been tried to ‘beat the search engines’, in other words to endevour to get websites a top listing, especially in Google. Many of these have been unsuccessful, and even the successful ones have been short lived as Google and the others have found ways to combat the ‘cheats’!
I take a different approach. The job of the search engines is to give their visitors the best result they can in response to the search questions they type in. My job as a SEO expert is to help Google, Bing, Yahoo and others to deliver excellent results to their visitors. I do this by ensuring that my clients’ websites provide exactly what the search engines and their visitors are looking for relevant to the products, services and information being searched for. That way there is no likelihood of my clients’ websites ever being penalised for ‘cheating’, unlike the clients of those who are still trying to beat the search engines. On the contrary websites that are properly optimised for the benefit of the visitor, that give them valuable and useful information to meet their needs and that leave an easily followed ‘trail’, help the search engines to lead their visitors right to what they want.
That way we achieve a true win. My clients win by getting their products and services in front of qualified visitors, the visitors win by being able to easily find answers to what they are looking for and the search engines win by returning search results that satisfy their visitors so that they keep using them to find their answers. And I win too from having happy clients and from the satisfaction and pleasure of working with Google and co. to ensure everyone wins.
In my SEO category I will be talking about the more important search engine optimisation techniques.