Search Engine Optimisation – What is it?

If the title of this article has baffled you and you run, or are thinking of operating a website then read on!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in basic terms is the view that lots of people surfing the web nowadays use a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo to find the information they want. Therefore if you can ‘optimise’ your website to be more findable, you will get more people on your site.

Every marketing company or webdesigner now ‘does seo’ with the promise of top rankings and increased traffic overnight to your website. They might even chuck in some buzzwords, perhaps social networking, linkwheels, spinning content, linkbuilding and mention blackhat or whitehat techniques! Suitably baffled you will sign up to their ‘silver’ package on a £xxx or £xxxx monthly contract for several months and await the results.

I once met someone who claimed to ‘know people in google’, I ‘know’ people in Google however it frankly means sod all. I know someone who works for the BBC however that does not mean I know how Sherlock ‘died’ nor can I make Wrexham.com replace the 9 o’clock news. The wilder the claims or promises the more cautious you should be.

Search optimisation is the idea that you can improve the ability for people (or computers) to find your online presence, for many local busineses that means when someone types in ‘Widget Suppliers in Wrexham’ your company’s website pops up top of Google or Bing. It is quite a basic aim, but if there is more than one of your after that then there is a competition. The search engine each has their own ways of working out which site is best for the user, these are often referred to as the search engine algorithms. They are big complex maths equations which in very simple terms give your site or pages a score and the higher the score the better.

The problem is no one really knows what search engines such as google use to score sites, and certainly no one knows what they will use tomorrow, next month or next year as it is always changing. Many people guess and have success with certain methods, however search engines dont like people gaming the systems so often change their scoring methods to take into account the attempts at gaming.

One quick example of this is ‘comment spam’. In the past the scoring was quite basic, if you had lots of links in, google thought lots of people liked your site. So, people created lots of links to their sites often in large automated ways by leaving ‘comments’ on blogs with a link back to their site in it. Search engines spotted this trend and devalued these links greatly. This should also give you an insight from the search engines point of view, they now in effect have a list of sites that used a spammy method to try and gain an improved rank – what would you do with that list?

That example shows the dangers of using spammy or short term techniques. Obviously online marketing companies and ‘SEOers’ will not tell you what they are doing is spammy, they will probably explain its highly confidential proven techniques that have worked for large sites before and stuff like this article is scare mongering. Its not, it has happened and people have lost rankings and entire listings in Google in the past.

In 2006 BMW’s german website was completely booted out of Google for using spammy techniques. No doubt when they were using them initally they helped, however they were not sustainable and they paid the penalty further down the line.

Often SEO companies will look to tie you into a contract, with promises of success just around the corner which never come. Others leverage their own networks and sites to ‘boost’ your site as long as you keep paying them. When you stop, links and other benefits are removed and you drop.

So what to do? Here are some simple tips if you are following this route (I wouldnt though!):

• Get written confirmation of what exactly you are paying for.
• Ask if ongoing fees are required to maintain rankings.
• Ask for reports of work carried out and manually look – does it look ‘dodgy’ to you?
• Avoid ‘tricks’ which may work today but could hamper you tomorrow.
• If someone claims to ‘know someone in Google’ run away as fast as you can.

Overall the search engines are getting as clever as humans. Google has more data and information processing capabilities than is comprehendable , so to build something that is sustainable tomorrow , next month let alone next year based off hacks and tricks simply does not work. Search engines are getting faster to respond to ‘trick’s too, in years gone by something may have worked for a year or two, that then fell to six months and now the major engines roll out tweaks on a near daily basis.

My advice would be to look for a ‘SEO’ provider who does not offer SEO, but focuses on a forward thinking wider marketing strategy with decent internet awareness!

A good example of this is the ever increasing number of geolocation devices out there, or mobile phones with GPS to me and you. There are companies who provide software to tie in visits to a location to offering promotions based off it, so visit a coffee shop three times and get a cake for free.

The majority of SEOs would be lost by now, and think that is entirely irrelevant to the subject! Does it sound implausible that Google would take such information, an indicator of visitor popularity, and add it to the information they probably already have – the address, company name, website and the like, and use it as a ‘quality indicator’ to help its scoring?

This may sound like futuristic sci-fi nonsense, but it is already happening. You cannot fake being good, so dont try, just try to be good!