TosakP’s Weblog

If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Getting a company’s name and products, or services, onto the first page of a genuine Google search isn’t a trivial piece of work. In fact, there are four distinct skills that a search engine optimiser needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all four. In truth, to get to all four, people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills. Now, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do this? Is this the best use of your time?

Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work are:

• Web Design - producing a visually attractive page
• HTML coding - developing Google friendly coding that sits behind the web
• Copy writing - producing the actual readable text on the page
• Marketing - what are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?

Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching designs with animations and clever rollover buttons hoping to entice the people onto their sites. This is the first big mistake; using designs like these will actually decrease your chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s right; all that money you have paid for the website design could be wasted because no-one will ever find your site.

The reason for this is that before you get people to your site you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to trawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by spiderbots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful search.

I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately know they are a waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem. So, optimising a website to be Google friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy to find site.

The second skill is that of optimising the actual HTML code to be spiderbot friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like Frontpage, which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the search results.

This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur.

Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept on what the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first results page in Google.

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi, love text - but only when written well in proper English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks, they may actively penalise your site - in Google terms, this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months, you can still be found but not until results page 14 - really useful! As well as good English, the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.

The final skill is marketing, after all this is what we are doing - marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.

I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimisation companies need more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.

John Fowler trained as a Mathematican and has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much of the time in sales related functions. He now spends his time between being a partner in SEO Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for ICT companies. John can be contacted via SEO Gurus

Tags: engine, google, indexing, Inktomi, optimisation, optimization, placement, ranking, results, search, seoengine, google, indexing, Inktomi, optimisation, optimization, placement, ranking, results, search, seo

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Finding the right SEO tools and resources can be challenging - but we’re here to make it a little easier on you. SEO forums and newsgroups can be very confusing to a person with no SEO experience. These forums and newsgroups are just so heavily populated that they can intimidate many new users.

The first rule regarding these situations is to just slowly try to integrate yourself into the community. Follow these rules closely and concisely so that you do not offend anybody:

1. Do not spam the forum with your problems. If you have a few things that you would like to discuss you will probably get help, but do not try to hog all of the assistance for yourself. For one thing, most of your questions have already been answered, believe it or not. There is generally a “search” option. Always use this before posting your problem.

2. Do not “Flame.” Flaming is a term used among forum dwellers to describe the behavior of “yelling” at people via the forum. This is generally associated with cursing, constant argument, typing in all caps to try to convey anger, and dismissing other people’s posts in an undignified fashion. There are other problems that are included in flaming, but I have given you the jist of it.

3. Never take a post off topic. If there is something that you would like to discuss that was inspired by a post on another topic, post a new topic in the appropriate board and explain where the topic was conceived. You may still want to reply to the post just to let people know that the topic has been created so that somebody else doesn’t take it off topic.

4. Do not “bump” your thread (or post). Bumping a post is when you reply to your own post in hopes of getting a response sooner. The only time that this is acceptable is if your thread has laid dormant for about a week. Bumped threads are very annoying to most forum users. Bumping posts on a regular basis will probably lead to a lack of interest in your posts and will probably contribute to a lack of support in your ventures.

6. Be friendly. There is no reason that you can’t be completely polite when posting on a forum. You will get very good response if you are simply polite in your post. Politeness in the world of forums includes making sure that you have communicated your problem carefully so that people attempting to help you can understand and provide answers to the best of their abilities.

7. Join in on the community favorites. Many forums now include “games” which are occasionally pretty fun. They are pretty much just there for if you are bored and waiting for a response to your other posts, but they are enjoyable if you keep up with them as many forum dwellers are quite articulate and witty.

Here’s a list of resources that you can use when you need help but you don’t want to pay for it.

Finding Groups.

Google makes discussion groups easy to find with their ‘Google Groups’ tool (groups.google.com). Go there and type in ’seo’ to see what’s on offer. Two popular groups are alt.internet.search-engines and alt.www.webmaster. If you don’t like Google’s groups, try Yahoo’s instead (groups.yahoo.com). Either of these sources will provide you with a pretty substantial list. Remember, regular search engine listings seem to apply here so generally you will see the best results towards the top of the listing.

dmoz.org is a good place to start: from their home page, you can browse down to any subject you want, and you should find at least one mailing list, discussion forum or message board in the listing.

There are several forums out there on the web that focus on SEO, and you can learn a lot from all of them, even if some of the discussions are over your head at first. Even ordinary searchers can learn a lot from following these discussions, as they tell you a lot about how search engines work.

Here are some useful forums: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, ThreadWatch, Best Practices Search Engine Forums, cre8asite forums and the High Rankings Forum. Check them out.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about
SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

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How to Establish Long-Term Relationships with Your Clients

One of the keys to success in any consulting or service focused business is to build repeat business. The more value services you offer a prospect the greater the chance of signing that prospect to a contract. Show a decent ROI and you improve your chances of repeat business from that client.

Become More Valuable to Your Clients
Most businesses are busy running their companies and need to rely on outsourcing to develop and implement their SEM campaigns. Even some of my prospects who have their own marketing departments have no idea of the difference between organic and paid search. And why should they? If they don’t have the personnel to dedicate to SEM research then they need to outsource. As a search engine marketer, if you only offer SEO services then you may be missing out on major opportunities. Clients are willingly to relying on you to be the expert. They want you to provide a solution for them; therefore, the more knowledge you have the more valuable you are. Anybody can learn SEO and provide a solution. But providing complete Website marketing strategies and showing a return on investment is certainly a greater challenge. If you are capable of developing professionally tailored solutions that show decent returns on the investment then you improve the chances of that client returning to you in the future.

Brand Yourself as the Expert
So many businesses don’t understand what their search engine marketing needs and options are. And some businesses, despite having an adequate marketing budget, will knowingly allow the competition to own the top search engine positions. This is due to a lack of understanding. As a professional search engine marketer it is your job to educate these people of their options.

To be your client’s expert you need to:

1. Know their products or services
2. Understand their customer
3. Study their competition
4. Understand their goals
5. Set their expectations

If you can identify the above statements to your client then you shouldn’t have any problem fulfilling the client’s expectations. Often it may take a few meetings or conversations with your client to gain the necessary understanding to plan and implement the right solution. And for those unique situations that you have less experience with, expect that you may have to do several days of research before recommending the right solution.

Stay Current
Striving to be a search engine marketing expert isn’t just about search engine optimization. Some clients may have a difficult time justifying the cost of the long-term SEO strategy. And sometimes SEO is only a small part of a larger solution. And in some cases SEO is not a solution at all. It’s all up to you to uncover the solution. A great way to stay current with the latest search engine marketing news is by subscribing to rss feeds. A good feed could keep you updated on the latest developments and save you loads of time in your research. Make it a habit to read the feeds several times a week. Clickz, Search Engine Watch and E-Commerce Times provide great feeds that will keep you up to date.

Below are a few effective marketing approaches that we search engine optimizers tend to ignore.

1. Google Site Targeting
2. Yahoo Behavioral and Occupational Targeting
3. Industry Portals and Newsletters
4. Email Campaigns

Darren is located in eastern Pennsylvania and provides professional SEO services and Website marketing solutions to small businesses throughout Philadelphia and New Jersey.

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