Essential Know-How

Essentially SEO is about advertising, merchandising and exploiting the medium of the World Wide Web to gain visitors to your site that you actually want.

Google and its peers have billions of pages stored in their indexes. These pages contain news, product information, service information, items for sale and so on.  Each page is designed by accident or intention to inform a view on a subject or subjects.

The indexes such as Google and its peers therefore have a problem, in that each page is really an advert to someone's product, service, idea or ideology.  Many of these pages will just be pages with identical content, messages, products and services so how does it decide what to place where, when you run your search?

Paid for inclusion

Pay per click advertising is what it says, regardless of the quality of your message, the product or service. If you can pay enough your advert can be conveniently placed in the dedicated PPC panels included in and published by search engines.

SEO

SEO is far more sophisticated. To get your web pages to prominent positions you will need to structure your technology, content, linking partners and other components of your web pages/web strategy just to be even considered for inclusion into the index.

Does not seem fair then, that Paid for inclusion or PPC rides off the back of the hard work of SEO workers then, since a PPC ad can only be displayed when a search has been run to find normal pages.

How do you utilise SEO to get what you want?

Well, it is all about advertising as we said and then merchandising.  Can you remember the last time you went to a store and Coca Cola was not the most prominently placed drink on the shelf?  Nor can we.

SEO experts first ensure your technology is compliant to the spider's needs, then they ensure that your material is linguistically as good as it can be to make the perfect message for both your indented visitor and, yes you have guessed it, the index. They want to critique your writing skills as well!

This having been done you are almost ready to merchandise your site, its pages and your connected link partners to get top position on the virtual display shelf that is the Google, ASK, MSN, Yahoo Index and their peer's software interface to their indexes.

So what is SEO?

It is some geek in an anorak and glasses, making sure your message gets to the masses, in spite of the index giants' desire to blast you off the web with lucrative pay per click ads.