Some 10 years ago the phrase ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ was seldom heard and was primarily the domain of the IT specialist but today, more and more businesses are having their websites optimised to get ahead in their battle with competitors for search engine ranking positions. Equally, some 10 years ago the techniques involved in website search engine optimisation were incredibly simple and largely involved the insertion of the keywords for which it was required for the website to rank in search engines repeatedly onto the page, with a few synonyms, and ensuring the title of each page (the bit that appears in the blue bar at the top of the browser window) was named accordingly.

In today’s highly competitive online marketplace however, competition is fierce for top 10 positions on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) and the search engines themselves have developed highly sophisticated algorithms that take into account dozens of factors when indexing a website with a view to including and ranking it within their searchable listings. It’s no longer a case of cramming as many instances of keywords into each page – in fact this can lead to a site being punished in the rankings – and old tricks of placing keywords at the foot of a page in the same colour as the page background are definite ‘no-nos’ and can lead to a site being dropped by a search engine altogether. Therefore, in order for a website to achieve, and maintain, a consistently high position in the major search engines now requires a complex set of procedures to be implemented across the website, and increasingly off the website.

The major principle, of course, is that if your website appears on the 20th page of Google results then no one is ever going to see it – the rule of thumb is that if your website doesn’t appear in the first three pages of results then no one will see it is itself becoming outmoded with increasingly impatient web users largely viewing the results on the first page when a search is entered. It’s therefore essential that website owners achieve high rankings or lose out on the potentially infinite online market for their product/service to their competitors.

Try for yourself, think of a two to three word phrase that you feel precisely sums-up the goods and/or services you offer – a phrase you think your potential customers would be typing into Google to find a business such as yours – then enter it into a major search engine and see how many results appear: that’s how many sites with which you are in competition for search engine rankings. For example, even a relatively ‘niche’ product that is regionalised such as ‘bakers in Birmingham’ yields over 386,000 results on Google!

There are, of course, many search engine optimisation ‘companies’ and ‘consultant’s around who make rash promises! You know the sort of thing: “We guarantee a number 1 Google listing in 5 days” etc . . . Sadly, as appealing as such claims may be to the business person who has a poorly performing website, there is absolutely NO WAY to guarantee a position on a search engine’s listings. New websites are coming online daily, existing websites are changing their content, search engines are changing the way they index sites continuously, links to website from other sites ae constantly changing and a myriad of other elements are in a constant state of flux and so it is IMPOSSIBLE to state with any degree of certainty how high a position a website can attain in the search engines. Furthermore, some unscrupulous companies offer ‘black hat’ techniques to get a quick result which are nefarious measures that can, and do, result in websites being banned by search engines – hardly benefficial to the unwitting businesses who employ such search engine optimisation ’specialists’ services!