SEO is not a dark art

Search Engine Optimisation has a funny reputation, with many people thinking it is some dark art of manipulating Google’s fancy algorithms to achieve not only page one rank but the hollowed “top of page one!” Admittedly, those SEO emails that I am sure land in your inbox on a regular basis – lovingly provided by your email address being sold to some database – do not help to dispel this misconception.

SEO is not some magical art, nor is it just about Google. It’s not even about getting to “the top of page one!” SEO involves achieving the highest position or ranking practical in the natural or organic listings on the search engines results pages after a specific combination of keywords (search term) has been typed in. Those “top of page one rankings” which those emails boast about are more often than not referring to the paid for sponsored results. In Google (since it’s the most used and recognised search engine) these are the adWords in the yellow box at the top of the page. SEO is about natural search listings for which there is no charge for in regards to being displayed or clicked on.

By putting some thought into your website copywriting, the use of short and long tail keywords, use of heading tags, anchor text and hyper links, image tags and document meta data you can go a long way to improving your natural search listings for your keyword terms. Couple that with building up some quality external links with relevant sites on the internet and you will achieve visibility and credibility.

Don’t get stung by those people who “guarantee” you “top of page one in Google” rankings. Some good practice and consistency on-page will give you the results you are looking for before you start getting into the world of adWords.
Of course, we provide SEO management as a service but we actively work with our clients to improve their on-page optimisation, external links and internal link structure. We also provide our Checklists to customers to help them work on their website themselves.