Knowledgebase

1. IMPORTANT!!!!! Read This First

First let's briefly discuss search engine optimisation.

What is it?
Briefly it is the optimising of the raw code of your website to help search engines index your pages and content.

Warning!!!!

Search Engine optimisation has become a multi million dollar industry, the web is covered with companies who will charge you a fortune for nothing other than educated guesswork.

Let us explain.

There are many companies, gurus and experts who will preach to you that search engine optimisation is what you need to get your website to the top of the search engines.

To an extent this is true and can be done. Here are the first two drawbacks

1. To extensively optimise your site yourself requires literally hundreds of hours of learning and implimentation, and being knowledgable enough to work out how search engines are currently ranking sites in their search results. Yes there are forums where you can pick up tips, but thousands of people read those forums and will all use the same advice. Guess what?? There are only 10 spaces on the first page of results, and tens of thousands of websites who want those ten places. Do the math and ask yourself is it worth the hundreds of hours with those kinds of odds?

2. To have a "Professional" optimise your site for you and get you into the top 10 will literally cost thousands of dollars, pounds what ever.

The Biggest Drawback

Search Engines DO NOT Want Their Results Manipulating!

Let us say that again

Search Engines DO NOT Want Their Results Manipulating!

One more time incase you missed it

Search Engines DO NOT Want Their Results Manipulating!

Search engines are interested in one thing and one thing only, giving surfers accurate results. they do not want SEO experts or you manipulating your site to the top of the results, what is more they actively fight against it. Here are a few facts for you to digest.

1. Search engines will NEVER tell anyone how they decide the order of their search results, there are silly gurus out there who claim to have inside information. That is utter rubbish.

2. Search engines regularly change their algorithms ( the way they order results) to beat the SEO experts who have worked things out.

3. Search engines regularly visit the forums we mentioned above to see what tricks the SEO gurus are using and combat them within their algorithms.

4. Search engines do not like many SEO tricks, far from helping your site they can harm it. The big search engines have been known to blacklist sites for using tricks they do not approve of.

Don't take our word for it here is a quote from Google

Quote:

Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don't load pages with irrelevant words.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

if you want to see that info in detail you can see it by clicking this link

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

So should I optimise my site?

Yes you should but only very basic optimisation. Enough to help the search engines index your site but do not try to deceive them.

We recommend this, include a basic set of meta tags in the head section of all your pages and make sure you have a robots.txt file uploaded to your site. More info on that by clicking "Back" after reading this.

Other than that focus on creating quality and useful content and information on your site. THAT is what search engines are looking for. More and more they are focusing on a sites content in their algorithms.

Finally, DO NOT rely totally on search engines for your traffic, you will come unstuck. many many webmasters spent thousands of hours and dollars getting to the top of Google and yes it brought them plenty of visitors. then a couple of years ago Google did the "Florida Update" (they changed how they ordered the search results) All of a sudden the sites that used to be at the top were on page 7 or 8 and their traffic literally stopped.

If you are silly then you will play the SEO games and put all your eggs in one basket. A basket that someone else is holding and can drop at any time.

Click Back to learn how to perform basic optimisation on your site.

After that is done you can take time to look at our Traffic Section in this forum and use all the methods of bringing visitors to your site.

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