The internet has become a large marketing arena for companies world wide, with the ever increasing number of businesses now using the internet as a means of show casing their products and services, this trend is directly attributed to the increased use of the internet as the tool of choice for searchers to find products and services they are looking for. Increasingly the internet search engines are becoming an important place for businesses to focus their market strategies. The focus now for marketing a company site is its visibility to search engines. With competition increasing on a daily basis for the top position within a search engine, means that an effective strategy such as Search Engine Optimisation needs to be used to bring a site up the ranks so they can be found by searchers.
The objective of SEO is to increase web traffic to a site by making the site visible within search engines. To make a site visible to searchers can be done two ways, one by paid placements, this is paying the search engines a fee to fast track your site up the ranks, the down side to this is that it is expensive, also if your site was not being found before using paid placement, as soon as you stop paying you will fall back to where you were. The second way is to be ranked by what is known as organic listing, if a site is structured in an efficient way that a search engines deems the content to be of importance to the searcher, then the site will naturally be placed in a higher ranking by the search engine, meaning the site will rank on its own merits. Organic listing is the objective of SEO, naturally ranking high and being found by searchers that will give you a return on investment.
Keywords are at the foundation of site optimisation, as these words or phrases are used to target your business, but it's not just as simple a picking a few words or phrases and hoping of the best. There is both an art and a science in optimising a site; the reason for this is that the site has to be engineered is such a way as to be in tune with the search and indexing criteria set out in a the search engines algorithms and this can change at various intervals, so constant monitoring of a site is necessary to ensure the site is in tune with the search engine criteria. Keywords important but all other factors need to be considered for a search engine optimisation campaign to successful.
Search engines play a big part in all this and in particular Google and its not just because it has become so big but because Google now feeds its results to a number of other search engines, this means if your found in Google you will be found in related search engines also. What is the objective of Google in all this? Their main focus is to ensure quality search results. So it is the sites that they deem to have good relevant content that will rank higher in a search listing.
Optimising a site to ethical standards, known as white hat SEO is important, there have been a lot of sites that have been optimised using unethical methods such as spamming search engines with keywords, while these methods have worked in the past search engines like Google will black list sites found to be using these methods, which are termed black hat SEO.
