Seach Engine Optimising Companies by XSEO

There's a whole range of tricks that you could pull to try and fool a search engine into giving you a good listing, but why bother? Tricks like cloaking, hidden text, keyword packing and the like are recognised by search engine operators, and you will get caught! Ethical search engine marketing, the approach that we favour is more time consuming and labour-intensive, but ultimately it gives the results both you and the search engines are looking for.

We hear about SEO pretty much every day. Judging by the number of unsolicited e-mails promising extra traffic, it should be a major growth area. 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). The XSEO approach to all this is offer the search engines what they're looking for: clearly understandable pages that can be easily classified by humans or spiders. Inevitably, there are a few tricks of the trade that we use, but they're designed to help the search engine, not fool it.

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