If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Getting a

company’s name and products, or services, onto the first page

of a genuine Google search isn’t a trivial piece of work. In

fact, there are four distinct skills that a search engine

optimiser needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe

two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all four. In

truth, to get to all four, people who are good at two of these

need to actively develop the other skills. Now, if you are

running your own business, do you really have the time to do

this? Is this the best use of your time?

Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work are:

Web Design – producing a visually attractive page

HTML coding - developing Search Engine friendly coding that

sits behind the web design

Copy writing – producing the actual readable text on the page

Marketing – what are the actual searches that are being used,

what key words actually get more business for your company?

Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching

designs with animations and clever rollover buttons hoping to

entice the people onto their sites. This is the first big

mistake; using designs like these will actually decrease your

chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s right; all that

money you have paid for the website design could be wasted

because no-one will ever find your site.

The reason for this is that before you get people to your site

you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots

are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to

trawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having

reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the

sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers

cannot be trawled by spiderbots. They come to your site, look

at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering

to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful

search.

I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately

know they are a waste of money. The trouble is that both the web

designers and the company that paid the money really do not want

to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing the messenger of

bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem.

So, optimising a website to be Google friendly is often a

compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy to

find site.

The second skill is that of optimising the actual HTML code to

be spiderbot friendly. I put this as different to the web

design because you really do need to be “down and dirty” in the

code rather than using an editor like FrontPage, which is OK for

website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to

develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the

search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate

how high your site will appear in the search results.

This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur.

Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added

or removed, and a check kept on what the competition are doing.

Many people who design their own website feel they will get

searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step.

Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work,

you will always struggle to get your company on the first

results page in Google.

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own

right. This is the writing of the actual text that people

coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other

spiderbots like Inktomi, love text – but only when written well

in proper English. Some people try to stuff their site with

keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so

spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall

for these tricks, they may actively penalise your site – in

Google terms, this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and

“naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months,

you can still be found but not until results page 14 – really

useful! As well as good English, the spiderbots are also

reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an

appreciation of the interplay between the two. My

recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to

write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be

read by machine and human alike.

The final skill is marketing, after all this is what we are

doing – marketing you site and hence company and

products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site

up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most

business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found as

you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying

in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great,

except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing

skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are

really trying to sell and an understanding of what actual

searches may provide dividends.

I hope you will see that professional Search Engine

Optimisation companies need more than a bit of web design to

improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work

can cover all the bases.