Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation, also called SEO, is simply what you do to your website in order to achieve the best possible position in the Search Engine results so that when people are searching for the things you do or sell, the search engines can put your website in front of them. Why is Search Engine Optimisation important? About 80% of web users turn to a search engine when they are looking for something. Only 50% ever go past the first page of search results and about 10% make it to page 3 and beyond which is why good SEO is important. The deeper your are in the Search Engine Results Pages [SERPS] the smaller your potential market becomes. . This is where I come in to play. I've been working with SEO since 1999 and have not stopped learning. This is because the search engines are always changing the way they measure websites - sometimes they make small tweaks and at other times it's major step changes and I need to stay on top of these changes because what worked yesterday may not work today - as many businesses who have taken their eye off the ball have found out to their detriment. It's critically important to stay on top of these changes because if you get it wrong your website can be penalised. At best the penalty will be that anything you do will be ignored by the search engines. This typically leads to a slow drift down the results as other businesses do the right things and are promoted above you. If you are caught doing something the search engines dislike then your website will be pushed deeper in the results, making it hard to find. The worst case scenario, when you are caught using something they really dislike, is deletion - the search engines simply delete you from their database. This is REALLY hard to recover from, can lead to 6 months of work, increased costs and lost business opportunities. For this reason, I only use ethical, best practice SEO techniques which ensure that your site will move up the results pages and won't be penalised.