SEO – What is all the Fuss about?

There is no white man’s magic attached to SEO. It is, explained in simple terms, and avoiding so many of the fashionable phrases and buzzwords associated with it, all designed to make your website more search engine friendly. Carried out properly, it should result in increasing the quantity and improving the quality of visitors to your website. SEO these days is also used alone as to describe those you can employ to carry out the techniques described and covered by SEO.

Will you benefit from it?

So much is being spoken about SEO these days that goes ‘right over the head’ of so many website owners, that some of them just abandon the idea of employing SEO techniques or employing an SEO Consultant to advise them, purely because they just do not understand what all the fuss is about. But there is no doubt that almost all website owners could benefit from it, employed properly and in a manner suited to their particular business.

Do you really need it?

Many small to medium e-commerce website owners are of the opinion that ‘if my prices are lower than all my competitors, buyers can see this if they compare them, why should I need to do anything other than keep my prices competitive?’ Or, ‘if I have found a niche in the market, or am offering the general public a service that no one else is offering, I am bound to succeed’. They are overlooking one basic – that is the fact that buyers have to FIND their website first, when searching for the products or services they offer, to be able to compare their prices with others selling in the same field.

It is a fact that more referrals to your website from search engines cannot alone guarantee more sales for you. And, that there are other Internet marketing methods that can be employed to improve sales that do not involve the use of SEO. But these will usually involve a lot of work and expensive paid for advertising. Utilised properly, SEO is an effective tool for most website owners wishing to improve not just traffic to their site but resulting sales from that traffic.

White Hat –v- Black Hat SEO methods

Statements from any SEO Consultant guaranteeing you that employing them will result in your website getting top ranking in Google are to be viewed with caution. Google, along with other search engines change their ranking algorithms and will not divulge detailed information of precisely how websites are ranked with them. No detailed discussion of these Black Hat SEO methods will be gone into here, as the main object is to discuss the Benefits of SEO when utilized properly, not to provide some sort of ‘School for Scoundrels’ where Black Hat methods are concerned.

What to look for in a good SEO Consultant

The aim of a good SEO Consultant (or a White Hat SEO Consultant) should be to achieve the most prominent listing of your website possible without the employment of Black Hat Techniques, but there can be no 100% guarantees – therefore the giving of such guarantees should be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. And, they probably intend to achieve this by employing ‘Black Hat’ methods, there is a very real risk that, although short term success might be apparent, the methods they employ will probably result in your website being penalised and even blacklisted by the most popular search engines. Some very large multi national organizations have discovered this to their cost.

In other words, good SEO Consultants employ ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques. And they will take into account the size and scope of the website business they are dealing with and make suggestions accordingly. It is not one rule for all and not every website will benefit the same from the employment of SEO. SEO Consultants who promise you the earth very quickly should, in the main, be avoided.

Suffice to say, the techniques will include the basics of ensuring your site is registered with major search engines, and listed in the appropriate directory. They will assist with the writing of optimal content for your website, and recommend changes where they would be beneficial.

If you want to learn about SEO I would recommend reading these posts in order:

• How to Write Remarkable Title Tags – an SEO’s perspective
• Improving CTR with Meta Descriptions and bits on other Meta Tags
• Tracking your Inbound Links

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."