IF YOU HAVE Internet access, the chances are that you use search engines such as Google or Yahoo! on a daily basis. Those search engines form the backbone of locating information on the Internet and for website owners getting a high rank on a Google search is a vital part of creating a successful website.<\/p>\n
Search engines such as Google collect information about and rank sites using a variety of techniques and it’s possible to customise websites so that they have a better chance of showing higher up on Google’s search. That technique is known as search engine optimisation (SEO).<\/p>\n
What practitioners of SEO do is to insert the right pieces of code – which are invisible to ordinary visitors but which Google’s systems will see – and “tweak” the content of the site so that it shows up more prominently when Google’s systems look at the page. In effect, if you were to compare a website to a motel at the side of a busy freeway, SEO puts up the neon sign and turns on the “vacancies” indicator.<\/p>\n
Of course, that’s only one part of becoming a top-ranked site on various search engines. Other aspects, such as the number of other sites that link to yours, also plays a part in determining how highly ranked you are. That’s why you’ll almost never find a link to a paid content site on the Google rankings because nobody links to them.<\/p>\n
The search engines are obviously interested in keeping their searches as relevant as possible and due to that they have rules as to what kind of behaviour is acceptable or not. And if they find a certain type of optimisation is distorting the results, they’ll tweak their systems to compensate for that.<\/p>\n
There are also less than honest companies out there trying to use SEO as a way to con unsuspecting companies out of money. So if you receive an email that reads: “I visited your website and noticed that you’re not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…” or something like that, ignore it. Even Google gets those emails and that fact alone speaks volumes.<\/p>\n