SEO
Specialists by XSEO
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. XSEO has a unique approach that is producing proven, measurable results
for companies like Virgin Cars and Virgin Bikes.
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.
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.
find
out more about search engine optimisation...
