Briquesetclics.fr Exquisite eBusiness Solutions, Website Design and Marketing With translation in English & French

Briquesetclics.fr January 2009 newsletter .

"Is Search Engine Optimisation Bunk?"

...The fact is, that good SEO requires a mixture of (good) technical and (good) marketing skills. Whether or not one even finds one skill or the other in a single person is rare enough. One finds both yet more rarely in a single person.

Undeniably, the industry has also yet to come of age from a really shaky start..

SEO itself started off in the late 1990's as something your could buy your way into (i.e. you literally could guarantee page 1 search results if your pockets were deep enough). However, with the dot.com burst in the early 2000's and the rise of Google, which championed free, organic search listings based on content, a scramble occurred to promote sites on that basis - come fair means or foul. This gave birth to "key-word-itis" - literally a scramble for search terms - and a subculture of myth and counter myth about what search engines would, or would not index by - and consequent good and bad SEO practice. Combine that with poor quality techies or marketers and the rest makes for a shady industry of myth and sub-culture, and, well, bunk.

Yet undeniably SEO is a necessary evil. You're probably reading this because you are trying to promote your site higher up the rankings. So what is a good cookie-cutting set of guidelines and what is myth?

A) Your site has to be well constructed and coded and meet HTML and CSS Standards. Google came to prominence on the basis of fast, accurate search results and it will not tolerate unclean - or lengthy - code. This also means if your site demonstrates unfair practice (such as keyword spamming and word-masking) then Google will penalise you (this is indeed what happened to BMW back in 2006).

B) If your site lacks content, don't expect to be found. Eye-candy sites are content vaccuums and dynamic pages are also heard to search.

C) Your site has to be what it purports to be.

D) You do need to be both marketer and technician. You cannot get away from this. You have to be aware of what your customer is looking for and orientate your content (and all the underlying SEO goodies, like title, desciption, keywords) to being FOUND.

E) Google's own search algorithms are heavy on reputation, so this does mean that developing links into your site from referring sites is important. (Reputation, basically meaning sites defer to you for content, as opposed to possessing that content themselves). So you do have to earn that reputation - you cannot just "buy links" - and this, I am afraid, is a marketing activity.

F) You can still buy your way to the top of Google page 1 via Pay-Per-Click (or Adwords). For all the above "Organic" SEO practice, you can still out-rank organic search results by paying for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. Indeed if you click and drag your mouse over a Google search results page, the fact that all the PPC results highlight (irrespective of their position on the page) before the organic search results suggests that for all its altruism, Google is also a business and has to make money!

SEO is anything but bunk. But it is undeniably a poorly served industry.

As with all forms of marketing, you must seek advice from someone who knows what they are doing, or you will end up wasting a lot of money with no results.

Why not look at my site: http://www.briquesetclics.fr or email me at j-assiste@briquesetclics.fr.

 If you already have a web site, we offer a free no-obligation review of the current optimisation status just of your home page. So why not find out where you stand?