Is there more to life than google?

I would be lying if said that google wasn't the main search engine. However, it is important to remember that Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Lycos and the others collectively have a significant market share. Businesses who fail to recognise this fact will be giving away a huge amounts of business. The search engine market is no different than any other market, in as much as the only sure thing about the future is change. Do not rule out the possibility that Google will not always be the top search engine. There are a lot of companies wanting a piece of the lucrative search engine market. One day or another a company will come in and take the crown just as google did some over years ago. It has been said that in the future different consumer problems will be solved better by lots of smaller players, as opposed to a single player solving all sorts of consumer problems. Or will Google just buyout all the smaller players who will threaten their market share. It will be interesting to see, but in the mean time you can't ignore Googles competition completely.

Common abuses that you may encounter

In my prevoius blog I mentioned common abuses you as a website owner may encounter when dealing with unethical seo companys. I thought I should explain these further a as Google do not allow these and will cause you problems if you use a SEO company employing these tactics to push your website up the rankings. Here is what Google advise.

1 Shadow domains

A common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains are often will be owned by the SEO who claim to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

2 Doorway pages

Doorway pages is another illicit practice, this is were "doorway" pages are loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

Hope this helps.

What to look for in a SEO.

SEOs can provide clients with extremely valuable services, however some unethical SEOs have given the industry a very bad name through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate Google’s guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of a site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from the index. Here are some things to consider:

1. Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
2. No one can guarantee a number 1 ranking on Google.
3. Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.
4. Be sure to understand where the money goes.
5. Be aware of the common abuses a website owner encounters such as shadow domains and doorway pages as Google do not allow these.

There are some other things to look for but which I will look at in later posts, but for now I would advise you to do your research, trust your own instinct, ask lots of question and don’t be taken in by slick sales men with a lot of false promises.

Points to clear with your SEO company

Just as you would when buying any other product or service there are some obvious questions you need to ask when speaking to prospective SEO company's


1.Ask to see examples of your previous work and discuss there success stories.
2.Do you follow the Google's Webmaster Guidelines?
3.Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business.
4.What kind of results do you expect to see, time frame?
5.How do they measure your success?
6.What's experience do they have in my industry?
7.What experience do they have in my country/city?
8.What are your most important SEO techniques?
9.How long have you been in business?
10.How can I expect to communicate with you?
11Will they share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

If you ask all these questions their answer will give you a strong indication if they are for you, I would advise that you speak to a a least 3 SEO companies and compare what the can offer to your.

Deciding on a SEO company?

If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, google advise you should do this as early as possible. The best time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and the SEO company can ensure that the site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Google advise that you should make sure you research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO company can do to your site. Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, including:
• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

You need to identify what services you think you need from your SEO then this will give you a starting point for when you start speaking to them.

SEO can you do it all on your own.

As soon as I started looking into SEO I quickly realised that I was not going to be able to do it all on my own. The first thing I did was go to the biggest and most widely used search engine Google (which by all accounts is doing well, I hope they ride out this economic downturn) and I looked at the webmaster guidelines which are a great place to start as they give you the advice you need to optimise your website for Google.

There were a number of things I was able to do on my own such as keyword research, then using the chosen keywords from my research I was able to write keyword rich content for my site. With this research I found what the most popular keywords and phrases were for my industry and focused on a number of them to give me a good range of phrase's not just the obvious generic terms. Then I could include these in my Meta tags, Meta Descriptions and Meta Titles, that was the easy part for me, I then had to look into linking, page ranking and the design which was beyond my remit of skills and knowledge this is when I realised I needed help with the rest of this Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO is hard work!

I have been looking into search engine optimisation over the last few months or so and it is not easy, there seems to be a a number of hoops to jump through to be successful and get to the top of the search engine pages and drive that traffic to your site. Some company's are obviously very good at it but to many like myself when I started it all that seemed search engine marketing was a technical black art. Even when you getting your head around it and start putting in the long hours into your keyword research and then start to optimize your pages by changing your meta tags, meta titles and descriptions to tailor your site to the search engines guidelines you then have to keep stopping and telling yourself this site is also for customers it has to look good so people will use it. Therefore it seems to be a battle between the technical SEO and the aesthetics for the user, if it is not set up correctly the site won't be found in the search engines such a Google and Bing, meaning you can have the most customer friendly site with no visitors therefore no customers, or you could have the top ranked site for a particular search term receive lots of visitors who don't use the site because it clunky and not user friendly and still you don't have any customers? This is where I believe the hard work is, getting that balance so people can find the site in the search engines and then it needs to be designed so people use it. This is hard work indeed.