Search Engine Optimisation is the process of pushing your website up the lists so that when someone searches for your product or service your website is first, or at least close, in the search engine rankings. it is the Rolls Royce of free advertising.

Is it REALLY Free?

Paying an organisation to improve your site's search engine friendliness sounds like a good idea. It sounds even better when they say, "You don't even have to worry about it. We'll do all the work." Unless they take ownership of your site and make changes to your content they are not performing legal SEO. Google's guidelines specifically state "Don't Participate in Link Schemes."

Overload

Search engines used to make use of keywords hidden in the site's code to index the pages. What was happening was that web masters were wise to this and put "dogs dogs dogs dogs dogs dogs dogs dogs dogs" in the keywords to fool the site into thinking the site had a lot to do with dogs. Now the keyword rates very low in the overall quality algorithm that calculates your ranking to combat this.

The next criteria that was picked in is links to your site. If your site is linked to a lot, the Search Engines view it as important, thus ranking it higher. This caused many Search Engine Optimisers to go onto any site that allows comments, then adding comments with links to the site in question, thereby SPAMming the Search engines with links and boosting the SER. This has been known to happen with small and even larger organisations.

Having interesting content that people want to link to your site is key. By participating in a forum where you make a valuable contribution and are allowed to have a link in your forum signature also boosts the amount of good quality links to your site. Logging in and commenting, "LOL," to a million posts is not considered a valuable contribution. Also, other users of the forum will visit your site, and possibly link to it from their blogs, sites or social media accounts.

Penalties

If your site is found to be in violation of any of the SE guidelines, your site is likely to be removed from the Search results or even banned from having any links on the Google Content Network, which makes up almost 80% of the web.

Real SEO

The best way to ensure your site is ranked highly is to make sure your users rank it highly. Facebook never had to worry about SEO because it is useful to the user. If users like your site, visit it often, make use of the content and features, then your site will feature highly on Search Engines.

Our recommended Steps are;

1. Make your site useful to the user
2. Use Search Engine Marketing or Advertising to Increase Traffic to your site
3. Make use of Analytics to see how to keep your site useful
4. Join and make a valuable contribution to a forum
5. When writing copy, consider using the keywords your clients would use when searching for your products or services
6. Ensure all image and video tags have relevant information for spiders to read. (image and video search is quite popular)
7. Consider writing a blog. Blogs not only generate content, and more keywords for Search engines to index, but they provide fresh content for your visitors and a reason to return to your site.

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