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Don't Destroy Your Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a practice often undertaken by businesses looking to get their web sites ranked higher in search engines. While the search engines do offer advertising options where its simply a question of how much you are willing to spend to get shown at the top of the advertising pile, natural search results, in other words what people see after they search for an item, produce better results and click throughs (people actually clicking on a link to a site).

SEO shouldn't be some mysterious act either. Any self respecting firm that offers SEO services wouldn't be shy to tell you what they are going to do, what they have done and report to you the results of what has been achieved. The best yardstick to measure an SEO firm by is what kind of guarantee they give you.

Lets take two SEO firms. Firm A promises to get you ranked number 1 in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Firm B promises to get you ranked higher than you are now and describes how they do that. You might already surmise that Firm B is the more trustworthy of the two. But when it comes to your business and the fact that Firm A will probably have "testimonials" from so called customers as to how wonderful their service is, it can be difficult to determine someones credibility.

The bottom line is, NO ONE can get you ranked number 1 on the search engines. Not even employees of those services. So there is no way that another company can make you number 1. If you looked more carefully at the guarantee you would realise that Firm A is talking about getting you ranked number 1 if people search for your companys name. To be perfectly honest, any half baked web designer can get you ranked number 1 on your company name... but how many people who know what service or product they want search by company names? They don't! They search by the product or service they need. So being number one in the list when people search for your company in Google is not much of an achievement.

Firm B then. They promise to get an improvement in your search engine rankings. They do not make any outrageous statements. They may say they can get you onto the first page or something similar, but this would normally only happen once they have done at least some analysis of your business and your site.

How does this happen then? Well, the first port of call is actually making your site more suitable for a search engine like Google. Most search engines do base a lot of their results on what are known as keywords; i.e. what people type into Google's search boxes when they look for something. After having gotten to know your business to at least some degree, Firm B would consult with you on which keywords you would like your site to be optimised for. What this means is that for certain keywords you get your site ranked highly. But which keywords would that be?

Its actually quite simple. You need to determine keywords for which there are a reasonbable number of searches made on but for which there are relatively few results. If you are into making bicycles for example, trying to get ranked high on the word bicycles will be difficult as there are millions of results. Finding a niche set of keywords is what you should be aiming at. In other words, a set of keywords where you have a high number of requests made and a low number of exisiting sites found on it. Firm B would advise you on this. So a keyword pair like "racing bicycles" might result in more people clicking through to your site.

After the correct keywords are identified, Firm B can then go about altering your site to make maximum use of these keyowrds in various ways to help search engines like Google realise that your site is quite heavily related to them. But it doesnt end there.

Links are very important. Google uses links pointing at your site as another way to calculate how valid your site is on those keywords. But beware. Do not fall for the quick schemes where people offer to stick your site in link directories, etc. These "link farms" as they are called, take your money, and stick a link to your site along with many others onto their web site. But you run the serious risk of having Google disocver your attempt at trying to cheat your rankings and then they will deliberatly knock your rankings much lower and perhaps even ban your site from their database.

Pretty much anything that sounds as if you are trying to trick a search engine, even if they don't right now block that kind of activity, can cause your site to eventually be dropped in rankings considerably or banned if the search engine company changes its policies.

Again, a decent SEO firm would be able to warn you of these dangers.

So the next time you read an offer online about ranking your site in the search engines that just sounds too good to be true .. it probably is. If you are serious about SEO, get a company who is not scared to discuss their methods, describe what can be done and what the plans are. Anyone that is completely open is more than likely going to do a good and honest job for you.