Search Engine Optimisers by XSEO

There are many search engine optimiser companys around the world. One reason for all this activity is the widespread availability of so-called optimisation programs.

They analyse your page and make recommendations on what you can do to make it more search-engine-friendly. The best among these are updated almost daily to stay abreast of changes in Search Engine criteria. But we've seen some that haven't changed for two years, and they're downright dangerous (see pitfalls for more on this).

So do you tweak your pages every time there's a change in search engine practice? If you like, but bear in mind that you won't see the results of your optimisation for four to six weeks, so how do you tell if you were successful? SEO does work, and it will bring more traffic to your site. But there's no substitute for knowledge and the capacity for hard work.

Every month we record and analyse the increase in traffic we're delivering - and that traffic is monitored through to actual sales. There are few tricks involved, other than being "on the case" and ready to innovate and put in the commitment to delivering the result.

So What Is It?

There are essentially two types of search engine: those driven by automatic "spiders", and those operated by human editors. In practice many of the listing companies use a combination of the two techniques.

Spiders have a limited amount of intelligence which allows them to judge the relevance of a page for a particular search criterion. They're also able to recognise - and delist - certain of the more obvious tricks. This helps the search engine companies to avoid sending hits to sites that are trying to gain traffic that isn't relevant to the search word. Human operators visit hundreds of sites daily, making judgments in a few seconds of what the site's about.

Yahoo is the best known of this type of directory; like most systems of this type, Yahoo also receives input from spiders. Web site ptimisation is the process of making a site easily understood by the spider or the editor. A carefully judged weighting is given to certain keywords to achieve a listing under relevant searches.

When a page has been optimised, it's submitted to the search engines for evaluation and - hopefully - a high level listing. This last part of the process is a question of finely judged timing - Multiple submissions are necessary, but overdo it and you'll be de-listed (see pifalls for more about this).

Is that all?

If page content was all you had to do to get a high listing marketing for search engines would be easy. Alas it's not you can have the most optimized site and still not appear in the listings. To explain this there is a phenomenon known as the exit syndrome, if you type the word "exit" into Google and search why do Yahoo and Disney come top amidst 17million search results? Especially when consider neither organisation have any desire to do so.

Any Internet marketing company with a good understanding of how search engines work will be able to explain the exit syndrome the dangers are in using an SEM company that either cannot explain the theory or worse don't use it wisely when epitomizing a site.

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