What is SEO?

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results."

If you run a company website, I'm sure you have been bombarded with offers of SEO from companies promising you 1st place in Google within a week (as long as you part with lots of your money first!)

From Wikipedia:

"SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing"

The majority of these offers are scams. The companies either take your money and run or use techniques that will make it appear you have risen through the ranks but whose methods are not approved by Google and so your site can end up blacklisted and not found at all (I am focusing on Google as they have a 75% market share of internet searches)

SEO in it's basic form is simple. There are in fact only 4 steps to take:

1, Have a well built site that search engines can easily index

2, Make sure your content is relevant to your subject (if you're trying to sell 'widgets', don't have hundreds of articles on 'Gadgets')

3, Make sure our content is written for the web with the correct keyword density across the text

4, Get as many 'quality inbound links' as possible

Here at 146webdesign, we focus on the first 3 steps on all the sites we build.

We also offer a free SEO appraisal for sites that would like to see how they are performing and will provide optimisation for anyone wanting to improve their ranking

Please get in touch today to find out more