Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and should I be paying for it? This page is a SEO guide with answers and SEO resources for merchants selling on the internet.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (or organic) search results (in other words not "pay-per-click"). Usually, the higher up a site shows on a search results page the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific search engines. You can also find out more about how search engines work and how to start
a pay-per-click campaign.
Brief history of SEO
Site owners began optimizing sites for search engines years ago as the early search engines were indexing the early
Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider
to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.
Things have moved on since then with search engine algorithms improving and the ability of search engines to crawl and
index more sites has vastly increased. Early search engine algorithms used webmaster-provided information such as the
keyword meta tag. Meta-tags we supposed to provide a guide to each page's content but using meta tag data to index pages
was less than reliable, mainly because webmasters started to abuse meta tags by including irrelevant keywords to
artificially increase search engine results ranking for their website. It is for this reason that meta tag
information within web pages is not as important a search engine optimisation factor as it used to be.
Many search engines have come and gone over the years the majority of web users use the following search engines,
these are listed below in order of percentage market share. When considering hiring a search optimisation consultant it
may be useful to understand that these are the search engines that should be targeted first and in this order of
priority. You should let the SEO consultant know that you understand this.
Where can I find reliable SEO consultants
We get asked this question all the time and the simple answer is that we don't know. We have come accross many SEO companies, some have contacted us directly others we have heard about via our many merchants. If any existing search engine optimisation company wishes to contact us we would be very happy to hear from you, if you could include details on your charging, a few examples of successful SEO campaigns (keywords, domain names and SERPS links) and details of any partner / affiliate schemes you offer for partners of your search engine optimisation services.
The best advice we can give on the subject is to follow Google's guidelines on employing search engine optimisation
companies.
There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list,
so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
- owns shadow domains
- puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
- offers to sell keywords in the address bar
- doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
- guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
- operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
- gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
- has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
The sponsored links above and below should point you to some search engine optimisation companies, when contacting any of these we believe you should take the advice given above.
What does search engine optimisation involve
SEO is the process of optimising the html and other content of a web page/site for relevant, targeted key phrases in order to improve listing position on search engine results pages in comparison to competing websites. SEO can and should require a great deal of manual effort and hard work and this costs money but it still can provide a good return on investment because of the increased and better qualified traffic and the customer enquiries and sales that this can convert into.