The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase the visibility of your website by achieving a very high ranking in the SERPS (Search Engine Results pages) by ensuring the most pertinent keywords describing the content of your site are effectively used throughout.

The higher up the search results you appear the more likely it is that prospective customers will find and visit your website.

The latest Comscore data tells us that 91% of Internet users use search engines. Websites are a dime a dozen so being on page 2 is just not good enough. People trust Google to give them the top 10 options and rarely search further.

The world of SEO cannot be fully explained in one blog post alone, but just employing the basic principles listed below will make a difference to the performance of your website.

So how can SEO improve your website over that of your competition?

Here are the fundamentals behind any SEO campaign:

• The first and most important component of your site is content.

Your website needs to have relevant and original content that accurately describes what your company is about. Google will know if you have plagiarized content from someone else. The more unique, content-rich pages your website contains, the better chance your website has of achieving a better ranking.

• Keywords

You need to identify what keywords best describe your company or what keywords you are going to be using as search terms. Once you have done this you need to incorporate these keywords into the content (if you have not done so already) and metadata without overdoing it. You don’t want to run the risk of spamming the search engine. So write for humans, not search engines!

• Links

The third step is to identify which websites to partner with your site. The more quality inbound links your website has, the better chance you have of increasing your Google ranking and as a result, your inbound traffic. An important point to remember is that quality is better than quantity - it doesn’t matter how many inbound links your site has, what matters is their site ranking.

Adding a few outbound links won’t hurt either, it proves you know who else has great content, but not too many. SEO isn’t an exact science, but its best to keep it simple. What you want is a clean, easy to navigate, content-rich website that is relevant and does what it advertises. You want the client to leave happy, and if possible, having bought something.

Good SEO doesn’t happen overnight and despite popular belief, it isn’t free either. If you’ve done your job well your website will rank and you will have increasing incoming queries, sales, website conversions and blog comments.

Your website is an investment. SEO is there to help your website be better than all the other websites out there. With a little time and money it can be.

For anyone who has ever uploaded a video into YouTube knows, the question that has always been unanswerable is “How do I find out who watches my video?”
Finally, YouTube has volunteered a solution to this problem to the delight to thousands of its subscribers.
On the 26 March, YouTube launched YouTube Insight, a free analytics tool […]

A colleague recommended that I take a look a free SEO tool available at http://www.websitegrader.com
If you want to do a quick SEO analysis of a website all you need to do is paste the URL of the website into the box provided and click at the bottom of the page. Within seconds you have a […]

Ok, so i’ve completely thrown the idea of live blogging out of the window due to non-existing internet connectivity but i’ll be posting my notes one by one in the coming days…
Keynote day 3: Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com
Jason has quite a reputation as an industry renegade, so I looked quite forward to his session. For those of you who don’t know Jason, his recent venture is a ‘human-powered’ search engine. So instead of relying on fancy algorithms like Google, Jason relies on human editing to provides […]

As an SEM company with a global reach, we were very interested in getting some feedback from other people regarding their experiences.
The panel included online marketers from Japan, China, Singapore, Australia and Latin America.
Common to all these (and other) countries is that they are much more diverse than the US. Not only do many have […]

Ok, not quite. The idea was to post summaries of the sessions presented at SES in real time but the reality is that having hundreds of people trying to connect to the same wireless network at the same time results in agonizing connectivity not seen in the modern world since the early nineties.
However, today Derrick […]

Without Website Analytics search marketers would only be obsessed with generating endless amounts of traffic.
There are many analytics tools on the internet that a webmaster or analyst could use to monitor where their traffic is coming from and how users navigate through their website.
Personally, I just make use of Google Analytics […]

My colleague Derrick and I are attending SES New York next week. If you interested in meeting up or having a chat, feel free to contact us and we’ll make a plan.
Our details are on this page.

Since the introduction of Adwords, Google has been rolling out new features regularly. Most of the time, these additions were aimed at helping advertisers to create more targeted and relevant advertising campaigns. Even though the introduction of the Quality Score (QS) algorithm and the associated introduction of minimum bid prices boosted Google’s revenue, the underlying […]

So your ad is sitting on position 1 on Google, and you get a reasonable amount of clicks a day. Your ROI is excellent and you think you have optimized your campaign to it’s full potential… You may also be mistaken.
One of the metrics in the Google Adwords reports that is often overlooked by search […]