SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Search Engine Marketing is all about telling people about your site so that they can click on a advertisement or link and find your website. Search Engine Optimisation (or positioning), on the other hand, is all about giving your site the best chance of being found using specific search keywords on a search engine. You can achieve higher positions in search engines by 'Optimising' your website for certain search keywords.

You can optimise, or make your website 'Search Engine Friendly', by applying the following suggestions:

• Use a robots.txt file
• Use native HTML tags
• Append your pages with .htm
• Map URLs for database driven sites and do not have 'ID' as part of the query string
• Optimise your Meta Description tags - Meta Keywords is no longer used because of abuse
• Aim for keyword density of between 5 and 20%
• Use your keywords once in Title, once in Description, once in a Heading <H1></H1>, once in a link, and once high in the Body text of the Page if possible.

Some companies may try to use tricks like 'cloaking', 'fontmatching' or use Automated Search Engine submitting software or re-direct pages depending on the search engine spider indexing the site - DON'T USE THEM IF THEY SUGGEST ANY OF THESE TACTICS. You will only do your site more harm than good and could be dropped off search engine listings.

The best way forward is a common sense approach. Fill your site with useful content that is relevant to your business and the people visiting your site. Add value to your site not widgets and heaps of links to unrelated content just to try and boost your ranking. This is not rocket science, but it does take patience and an in-depth knowledge of how the Internet works.

I have already helped Stella Doradus achieve a turnaround in sales from relying on Domestic Sales to now having a large Export Business generated entirely by the website I re-designed for them to be Search Engine Friendly.

Test it out by typing the search term 'mmds antennas' into ANY search engine or directory and you will see that they come 1st or near the top of the listings.

It may not be the prettiest site I have ever designed but it is buy far the most commercially successful.

Search Engines Versus Directories

Search Engines use automated spidering scripts e.g. Google.

Directories on the other hand are classified according to categories e.g. DMOZ Regional: Europe: Ireland: Dublin: Municipalities: Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown: Business and Economy: Property.

GETTING RANKED FIRST

Rather than try improve on what many other people in my business have already said, I have included the relevant parts of an article I found that answers, as well as I can, the question about getting ranked first.

The Myth of "Guaranteed #1 Ranking"
in Search Engine Marketing
By Dale Goetsch, Search Innovation

"You've seen the ads: Guaranteed #1 Ranking! There are no guarantees in search engine marketing and website promotion. If anyone tells you different, you should check quickly to make sure they do not have their hand in your wallet.

Suppose you sell widgets. You want to sell more widgets, and the way to do that is to make sure that more people know about widgets, and that you are the place to buy their widgets. You might decide to buy a half-page ad in a national magazine to tell your story. When you place that ad, you are "guaranteed" your position.

With a magazine advertisement, you know what the magazine's circulation is, who reads it, and which page will feature your ad. The magazine can guarantee all that, because they own the medium.

Search engine marketing is qualitatively different. When you work with a search engine marketing firm to promote your website, they cannot guarantee where your listing will appear. Certainly there are types of online ads where there are guarantees in place: banner ads priced at "cost per thousand impressions", pop-up ads, and so forth. These are like traditional media buys, where you are working directly with the owner of the medium where the ads appear.

Even so-called pay-per-click search engines cannot guarantee your position. In Google AdWords, for example, it is not just the price you pay for a given keyword that determines where you will rank. They also bring in other factors, including how often your ad is clicked-on, to determine which ad will be listed first. Just throwing money at them will not necessarily get you into the #1 spot.

The bottom line is this: search engine marketing professionals do not own the search engines. They can tell you that you will achieve #1 ranking on a given search engine, or they can tell you that the moon is made of green cheese, but there is no way they can make either of those happen. When you tell Time magazine you want your ad to be on the back cover, and you pay them enough money, they will guarantee you the back cover. If you tell your search engine marketing people you want to be #1 in AllTheWeb, they cannot guarantee you that result. They can recommend changes to your site that will increase the likelihood of your ranking higher, but that is a long way from a guarantee. If you do not control the medium, you can't guarantee the result. Since your search engine consultant doesn't control the search engine, there is no way they can guarantee your position.

The ranking algorithms of the search engines are a closely-guarded secret. The search engine wants to give top ranking to the site that is the best match to an individual visitor's search query, not to the site that was able to "beat" the system. That is where the value of real search engine marketing comes in.

While the search engine marketing person cannot guarantee you a position, what they can do is to apply years of experience to tell you what has worked in the past, and to help you make it work today. In many ways, "organic" search engine optimisation is really a matter of editing web pages or whole sites to make them the most search engine friendly they can be. Making sure that a given page has just the right combination of keywords, title, links, and so on, is really at its base simply a matter of making that page the best web page it can possibly be. The page that will rank the best in the search engines is also the page that will make the most sense to the human visitor. Rather than relying on tricks to try to make the page rank high, it is a matter of just making the page the most focused and on-message that it can be. The bad news is that this doesn't guarantee which position in the search engine rankings that page will occupy on a given day. The good news is that the page will always rank well.

The search engines change their algorithms from time to time. If today's rule, for example, is that just the right combination of text in the title tag will make or break a site, and you know this is true, then all you have to do is to tweak the title tag to fit within that rule, and you will automatically rank very high. Today.

Suppose that tomorrow, however, that rule is changed. Suppose that now the most important factor that the search engines use to rank a site is the content of the META Description tag. All the work you went to yesterday to fix the title is now useless. All of your attention is now focused on fixing that description tag.

Clearly, over time the focus of the search engines will vary. The best way to deal with this is to not deal with it! This means that rather than tweaking a site one way today and another way tomorrow, the best way to approach optimising a page or a whole site is to not try to beat the system. Instead of trying to "psych-out" the search engines, why not add value to the site? A "common sense" approach to search engine optimisation, looking for long term results, is the way to go. When you try to help a site rank better by making it the best it can be, everybody wins.