Saturday, July 5, 2008

Search Engine Optimisation; Content, Content, Content

Search engine optimisation is rapidly becoming the buzzword in the world of internet business. It is likely that if you own a site that at some point you will have been approached by an SEO company courting your business and promising that you will see top search engine rankings in a short period of time. Ultimately these guarantees are often misleading and wholly unrealistic. Any company that claims that they can secure top rankings is most probably unscrupulous. That said, while there are many in the business that will happily lie to court your business, there are a great deal of optimisation companies out there who operate morally and only employ ethical forms of SEO.

Fundamentally it is important for you to understand when undergoing a process of search engine optimisation on your site that no one can guarantee the top position for any given search term. Only those who have the power over the search engines can make such guarantees and as none of the major engines utilise optimisation in-house, no guarantees hold water. Your optimisation strategy instead of pursuing high rankings at all costs should instead focus on three core principles. These are accessibility, usability and high quality information. If you make your website accessible to the searching public, easily usable and filled with quality, well written and unique content, optimisation will follow as a matter of course. By putting these three principles into action during development, the optimisation of your site will be made much easier and search engine rankings will eventually follow.

You must also remember when looking into a process of search engine optimisation that results will not be instant. SEO is not a quick and easy way to court online business and will in actuality take a great deal of time. It will require hard work, most important is the content on your site, spending time creating content of high quality may be time consuming but when it comes to optimisation it is essential. Patience is a virtue and nowhere is this truer than in the world of search engine optimisation. Most moral SEO companies will explain this to you from the outset, if a company is promising rapid results it may be worth finding a different company to carry out your optimisation efforts.

The importance of high grade, unique content in search engine optimisation cannot be stressed enough. It is a vital building block to SEO success. Even if you have a site that is technically perfect and highly visible to the search engine spiders, without good content you will fail to see results. If you have concerns over what defines quality content fundamentally it should be well written text that is factually and grammatically correct. The content needs to be unique and above all worth reading. The importance that search engines place upon quality information cannot be underestimated; good content will eventually lead to rankings success. Quality content means that not only the spiders have a reason to visit your site but human users will also find it worthwhile. By updating this content on a regular basis, the spiders also have a reason to keep coming back to your site.

If you remember these golden rules it is likely that your optimisation efforts will be eventually successful. Content cannot be underestimated in the design stage and should form a large part of your efforts early on. While there are many factors to consider including off page elements that will fall under the control of your SEO specialist, by dedicating yourself to the content you give your specialist the building blocks of a great site that tops the rankings.

About the Author

Internet marketing expert Thomas Pretty looks into the importance of quality content in the search engine optmisation process.



Article Source: Content for Reprint

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