Search Engine Optimisation

Do you own a website or are planning to launch a site sometime soon?

After having launched your website, to make it successful you need to have targeted traffic - visitors who are interested in buying your products or services.

The only problem is, how do you actually get visitors to come to your site?

One possibility, which is a very valid strategy pursued by many reputable companies, is to purchase pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines.

Although PPC (search engine advertising) gets you guaranteed traffic, it is temporary. Once your adverts run out, so too does your traffic.

An alternative to PPC advertising that is far more cost effective is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Once you hire a company to optimise your website for SEO, you will gradually see an increase in organic traffic to your website from search engines – people search for something your website offers, and the search engines direct them to your site, free.

Unlike pay per click advertising, once your site has been optimised, you do not need to continue paying for PPC to keep getting traffic from search engines.

The free traffic gained from search engines with SEO could continually bring you traffic for years to come which in turn would save you thousands of pounds worth of pay per click visitors.

If done correctly, SEO is by far the smarter, more efficient, and more cost effective way to guide search engine users to your website.

Although SEO companies oftentimes offer their services on a monthly basis, do not be fooled. With a few months of good SEO work, your website’s search engine placement could be so strong that you will not need any more SEO work done for your website for months, or maybe years to come.

Smart Traffic is a very well established UK SEO company. They offer proof of their work via a portfolio showing recent clients and let you see for yourself how their clients are performing in the search engines - ranking for their competitive search terms.

When searching for search engine optimisers, it is a requirement to see proof of their success with a portfolio of websites worked on to back-up their professional services.

Another must thing to watch out for with search engine optimisers are for companies using the dreaded Black Hat SEO techniques.

Although Black Hat SEO has been proven to work, this can sometimes lead to your website being banned from the major search engines because of breaking search engine rules.  

White Hat SEO (used by reputable SEO companies) follow all search engines rules.

White Hat SEO specialists increase your rankings by tweaking and cleaning up your website, adding good or removing irrelevant content, moving code that could potentially prevent a search engine bot from crawling your site to different files, submitting press releases about your site and so much more all in order for it to be found on the net and spidered by search engines - indexing and caching pages.

One company that is very straightforward about their White Hat techniques is
White Hat Media who are very clear about how stringent they are in staying within the boundaries set forth by the various search engines.

SEO is a very cost effective way to increase traffic to your website; if you’ve considered a pay per click campaign, you might also consider running an SEO campaign in addition to, or instead of your pay per click campaign.

Some top UK SEO websites, consultants and agencies to consider are Seoptimise, Big Mouth Media and Just Searching.

Of all the sites mentioned here, you are sure to find one that meets your needs.

Black Hat SEO is a form search engine optimisation. It is called Black SEO because it is not by any means ethical SEO.

Black Hat is deemed to be the naughty tricks used to gain search engine favourable positions for a website.

It is called Black Hat SEO as opposed to the squeaky clean search engine optimisation called White Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO has been proven to work however, because it is deemed as unethical practice it can often lead to a website being penalised or banned by the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN / Live.

Here we take a look at 4 widely used Black Hat SEO techniques:

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is used in many different ways. It is all too often used to stuff a website’s title and description meta tags with as many keywords as possible.

Other methods of keyword stuffing are making words on a webpage invisible. This is often done by blending in the words using the same colour background as the website.

A good way of searching a website for hidden words is to to swipe the page itself and look out for any words that were not clearly visible when first viewing the page. Hidden words will be highlighted in a different colour when swiping the web page.

Cloaking
This is done using many methods including the ‘noscript’ tag. Noscriptallows webmasters to develop webpages with content hidden between these tags in the page so that it will not be viewable to visitors of a website. However, content between the Noscript tags can be crawled by search engines when the website is spidered.

By using the noscript tag webmasters are able to add whatever type of content, keywords and links they like to the hidden area to try and gain favourable search engine positioning.

Doorway Page
A doorway page or website is an entry point to deliver traffic gained via the search engines to send to another website. A doorway oftentimes contains keyword stuffed content to gain a favourable position in search engines for free search engine traffic.

Once a visitor lands on a doorway page it is likely the visitor will be redirected to another website in no time at all via some means of a redirect code embedded in the page or website itself.

Link Spamming
In recent years pharmacy websites selling viagra, ciallis or similar have been by far the biggest abusers of link spamming.

Link spamming is generally used by these type of websites because many website owners do not want to place a link on their website to such sites as they can oftentimes degrade the nature of the website.

What these type of websites set out to do is gain as many links as possible from websites where they are able to post comments with links to their websites.

They will use linkspamming methods to gain links at forums, blogs and directories.

Oftentimes their posts and comments are deleted fairly quickly, however many links in posts and comments they create are evaded by the website owner and eventually these links are spidered by search engines thus giving these website/s favourable search engine rankings.

Search engine optimisation or SEO as it known to many for short is the work undertaken on a website for improving search engine results to gain free targeted traffic to a website.

Many companies today are taking their website advertising revenue and spending a large chunk of it on search engine optimisation.

By optimising their web pages for search engines, not only are they positioning themselves for less advertising expenditure in the future but they are also targeting their website to real visitors who go in keyword search for their products and services via the search engines.

Oftentimes search engine optimisation is mistaken to include link building. This we believe are two totally different entities and should not be spoken of in the same light.

Where building links to any website is concerned it should be deemed as a form of website promotion.

Website promotion should be seen in the form of link building, gaining one way links, buying text link ads, banner advertising, TV and radio advertising etc.

Search engine optimisers are increasing in huge numbers around the world. Many of these search engine optimisers are not certified optimisers but have proven experience in doing what is right for a website to take it to a higher level in search results making it easier for potential buyers and visitors to find their website.

Some of the work undertaken by SEO consultants include editing a website’s source code, adding and removing content, further development and design etc.

This is all undertaken to make a website more ’search engine friendly’ - a term that has become familiar with SEO for websites that are deemed to be easily read whereby search engines can crawl the site’s pages easily, find new content and index the website’s pages for inclusion in their search results.