Nick’s Blog|Nick’s Personal Blog

Many people claim to know how to get the top of a search engine listing, most of these people are plain wrong and misinformed.

We don’t claim to know everything there is, but what we know works and works well. Below is an explanation of how search engines work, what has changed in the last few years and what we do to help your site.

It wasn’t long ago when Search Engine Optimisation was all about how many keywords you could gather in your meta tags (code which Search Engines use to use). As you may imagine, this would there in turn make the life of a visitor to the Search Engine frustrating because when they searched for something all these “wrong” sites would appear. To fix this problem the Search Engine Companies had to change the way they sorted the good from the bad. Some search engines implemented manual cleaning of sites and ordering, some required you to pay to be included in the listing and some of these sites are still around, yes they may be failing and unpopular but some people see it fit to still list themselves with them. Then there are the successful search engines which changed the way they analyzed the content and popularity of the sites they were listing, e.g. Google.

When you think of search engines what do you think of…? Many people would think of Google, but also many people would think of Yahoo and MSN search. The other search engines are rarely used and are mainly populated by the “elite” few that even know about them.

Google, MSN and Yahoo do not rely on Meta Tags anymore, to our knowledge only in extreme circumstances do they even look at the meta tags. Using meta tags can hurt your website if not done correctly (e.g. spamming and repeating keywords) and that is why there is a trend to not even use them anymore. If you look at the higher ranking sites they will rarely have meta tags, yet they are at the top of the list.

Google being a pioneer company started the new trend for Search Engines to start analyzing websites content, site structure, domain name and link popularity and not rely on Meta tags. Google looks at your website content, searches for keywords and how those keywords are placed along side other keywords and generates a rank on your content according to what people may search for. It also looks for how many sites “link” to your site as it thinks that if many people link to your site then you must have a useful site for its clients. But beware if the sites linking to your have been blacklisted as being “Link Farms” (sites that just place links on them for search engine ranking purposes) it will decrease your sites listing.

There are three factors that come into play with Search Engine Submission and Optimisation.

1. Content and Site Structure
2. Link Popularity
3. Unique Hits to your site

Unique Hits to my site you say? Yes, to get higher in the search engines you need to have lots of visitors. “But how can I get lots of visitors to my site when I am not high in the search engines” the answer from the search engines to that is plain and simple… They Don’t Care.

The way to get around this is pretty much covered when you look after step 2. If you list your site with other sites and other search engines and other directories; Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other Search Engines will “Spider” those sites and follow the links on those sites to your site. Therefore giving you unique hits from one search engine to the other search engine.

In the end, there is not a quick fix to getting higher in the search engines without paying for advertising. If you want a quick fix you must sign up and use services like Google Adwords and Overture. These allow your site to pay for how high your listing appears on the Advertising panels on the search engines. (You will see these for example on the right hand side of Google). If you wish to do these campaigns it will help your Search Engine ranking as well.

We work our strategy around focusing on the top three search engines and letting all the other search engines feed off that content. You may not realize that AOL search uses Google’s content and other search engines feed off Yahoo and MSN alike. Once you are in the top three you are pretty much assured of appearing in the other search engines in time. Why spend big dollars wasting money paying to be included in the other search engines when they will include you for free?