James Roberts wanted to buy accessories for his new car but unfortunately, he did not know which supplier to consult. A friend advised him to try the Internet. He typed in the names of the products he was looking for and up came the results. He then consulted the suppliers whose websites appeared on the first page of the results pages for quotes.



Why? The reason is simple, their higher ranking gave them greater visibility.

Roberts did not even go beyond the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPS) and most likely, he did not even know that they existed!

The major reason why many websites are failing to attract traffic is that most company executives assume that placing their website on the Internet is enough to pull customers in. They do not complement this effort with various Internet marketing solutions that are available. In most cases, they end up being disappointed with Internet technology and end up thinking that the buzz around it is simple media hype.

However, the reason why their competitors? websites brought much profit whilst theirs were a dead end is really simple! Those guys were clever and had their websites optimised for higher ranking, the objective of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process. SEO refers to the process of inducing a website to have a higher ranking on the SERPS.

Research has proved that over 90% of all first-time visitors to a website come via the search engines and that half of all online purchases are driven by the same search engines.

Food for thought really.

If the search engines generate so much traffic to a website, then it is self-evident that corporates and individuals should invest in SEO consultants who will baby-sit and ?tweak? their websites until they attain greater visibility on the Internet.

The online marketplace is also fundamentally different from its offline counterpart. In the instance of the latter, location is everything. An investor just looks for the ideal location from where he can be easily accessed his targeted market.

However, the Internet is extremely different. Access is determined by position which in turn is influenced by how the site is optimised.

Despite the fact that investing in a website that is full of whistles and bells is good, greater consideration should be made to SEO because, after all, there is no sense in having a site with award winning graphics but attracts low traffic because of its poor ranking on the search engine results pages.

There are many techniques that site owners and SEO consultants can use to get a high ranking and these are divided into white hat and black hat techniques. Black hat techniques should be avoided at all cost. They represent a short-sighted solution to a long-term challenge. Black hatters try to hoodwink the search engines to give them a higher ranking through unethical means.

However, most major search engines are now thoroughly screening against these techniques and will outlaw the culprits. Examples of black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, mirroring sites, invisible text (white text on white background) and creating ?doorway pages?. The latter are ?fake? pages that the user will never see but are used to trick search engine spiders.

Site owners and consultants should make use of white hat techniques that are ?natural? or ?organic? and these are based on the understanding of how search engines algorithms operate.

To have a high ranking on SERPS, a website should be have its title and descriptive tags optimised properly. This involves placing the appropriate keywords in the meta tags so that when a visitor types in the keyword on a search engine, the site will be picked up.

The design and architecture of the site must facilitate the crawling of search engine spiders. The use of frames, Javascript and flash must be kept to a minimum.

The quality and quantity of incoming links is another important criteria that the search engines use to rank a site. This is largely due to the logic that the more links pointing to a site is ample testimony of how that particular website is viewed by others. More links represent an endorsement.

The website must also be content-rich and the keywords must be spiced throughout the page as search engines need to read keyword-rich content in order to rank a site properly.

These techniques are not employed in isolation but are complementary in order to achieve the desired page ranking.