Why use search engine optimisation?

Many question why they should have search engine optimization. You might want to save yourself the time and effort of keeping your site content ahead of the game and employ other methods of marketing instead. If you do that, you will be leaving your competitors an open field online, and the result could be that your online business shrinks and you miss out on huge potential moving forwards as many people like to buy or search online nowadays. Taking on a search engine optimization company will give your business a better chance of succeeding online.

An SEO company will work on your existing site or with your development team from inception to launch. Their goal is to bring your search engine rankings up, build greater presence on the net and push traffic to your website. More hits = more business and that is the name of the game. Achieving a higher ranking could put your company among the big boys, giving you the opportunity to make it a more attractive alternative. Your online presence is a potential customer's window to the services or products you provide. Brand awareness can be increased by using search engine optimization - by increasing the number of visitors to pages on your site, not only is the potential for sales increased, but also the network of contacts, which could bring more customers your way.

Using SEO companies on a monthly fee basis can be more cost-effective than paying search engines per click, particularly once your site traffic increases - but either way, the effectiveness of optimisation is likely to far outweigh the cost in terms of increased revenue.

What Is Link Building?

Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to ones own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc. Link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. There are few types of linking one of which is reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links or link exchanges is the process where two webmasters agree to show the other's link on their website. After link building when the number of sites which link to a particular site is known as link popularity which helps in the search engine ranking of a website.

There are many advantages of link building.

1. Link building helps in getting quality traffic from relevant sites which increases sales.
2. Also when there will be high quality incoming links the site will also be seen as a valuable resource.
3. Link building helps in creating awarness, visibility and credibility of your site.
4. The site also obtains wider search engine exposure.
5. It also helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Today links have become important for all websites and they are worth the money. In fact, there are several companies dedicated to selling links (as opposed to companies that you can pay to do link building for you).

White Hat vs. Black Hat

If you are considering employing the talents of search engine optimization services, there’s no doubt that you’ve conducted some research on the internet and come across the term ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ techniques. It may conjure up a mental image of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, but what does it mean when it comes to increasing your standing on search engine results pages?

As you’d expect, it refers to the tactics employed by SEO services. The white hat method can be generally though of as creating content for users, something that will keep a search engine’s web crawlers happy. Each search engine has it’s own set of unwritten guidelines, and one of these is to ensure that whatever meta tags are attached to your page are relevant to the content. Web crawlers employ algorithms that will index and rank your page depending on this content, and can determine where your site's page will rank for different terms.

On the other hand, black hat techniques are seen as a way to try and fool web crawlers, and are frowned upon by search engines. Some ruses involve trying to hide text on the page, by coloring it identically to the background or positioning it off screen. Another method, known as cloaking, recognizes if the page is being accessed by a human or a spider, and will direct each to different pages.

There are many more ways to fool a search engine, but as search engines get better at discovering black hat methods and take punitive measures on those guilty, you really do need to ask yourself if it is worth the risk.

Importance of link building

Link building plays vital role in higher search engine placements and good traffic to your website. Link Building is always beneficial for search engine rankings and traffic to your website from similar websites. It gets good results if its done in a professional manner with good quality websites. When ever you do link Building campaign for your website hire a professional seo company who knows how bad links can ban your website from search engine ranking, listings and make your rankings disapear for ever.

Before Starting a professional Link Building Campaign the website should be analysed carefully as what keywords needs to be targetted and how to benifit out of the campaign. A careful study of the website can lead to a better seo strategy and can fetch great results.

Social networking - say 'hello'

Whether your own preference is for Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the many other social media networking sites, the simple fact is that these sites present opportunities to help get your web site a more effective search engine ranking. Your search engine optimisation agency should be helping you reap the benefits of social media, and an important basis for that is to get your company registered with these sites.

If you have a brand name or company name that's already known and familiar to a large number of customers, it's vital you retain ownership of that name in the social networking media. At the very least you should be registered and have a profile on the most popular sites. You can have an account on many of these sites without being particularly active, although a regularly updated profile is worthwhile. You'll usually be able to include your URL in your profile and you may be able to add links to your site elsewhere. You can also encourage visitors to your web site (or any of your social media pages) to "follow you" to your social networking pages. Bear in mind, of course, that if you're using these methods you need to give your followers something fresh to read when they get there.

There are a great many social networking sites out there. In the next few articles we'll introduce you to them. We'll also explain some of the ways in which your SEO agency can make the most of them and raise the profile of your web site.