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SEO is the art of telling the search engines the subject of your website and then showing them that your site is not only the most relevant for a given keyword search but is also the most authoritative by working on obtaining links from other trusted websites.

PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising involves bidding on the keywords your customers are using to find you in order to appear in the sponsored search results in Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other number of locations. Each time a visitor clicks on the link in one of your ads, you are charged an amount directly related to both your bid price and the bid prices of your competitors, but never above your maximum bid. Depending on your industry, the amount of competition and the expected return on investment, bid prices range from as low as £0.02, but are far higher for terms relating to industries such as finance or real estate.

So very often when undertaking an SEO campaign for a new web business, or for a company who is new to the mysteries of search engine optimisation, things can go downhill very quickly when the client fails to understand that there is no magic switch which the search engine optimiser can flick and produce instant results.

The following are 6 (and a half) things which the client must understand when signing up for SEO services in order to prevent a lot of frustration on both sides:

1. SEOs have no control over how often search engines crawl your website. While we can do things to encourage them to come back often such as adding new content to the site on a regular basis and working on getting new links to the site on an on-going basis, the search engines and the search engines alone have control over what their spiders do and if they decide to only visit every six weeks and to only look at one page each time they come, then we cannot do much about it. As long as the the site is search engine friendly and the content is not stale they will eventually come back.

1.5 As an addendum to point 1, we also have no control over how long it takes a search engine to thoroughly index a new site. We can make certain that your site is search engine friendly, that all your pages are within 3 clicks of the home page, that the site structure makes sense and that there is a good sitemap which is accessible through the home page. We can start to build links which will indicate that the site is gaining in importance; but search engines will take as long as they will take in order to crawl and index your entire site. If your site is structured and coded well then eventually they will find all of your pages.

2. SEOs have no control over how quickly search engines acknowledge the changes you have made on your site and reflect this in your rankings. They may know that you recently rewrote all the head tags on your pages and each page now has a keyword theme which flows from the head tags through the copy and relates to the other pages on your site, but they may also take another six weeks to acknowledge that by showing your site for queries related to those keywords. They may only take 24 hours. But this is entirely up to them and how often they are re-ranking sites and how important re-jigging results pages are in relation to other changes they are making to their algorithms and their indexes is their call. You just have to be patient.

3. SEOs have no control over the weight given to any given on-page factor on your site. You may think that your pages are more relevant than your competitor's for a specific keyword search but if Google or Yahoo disagrees then there is not much you can do about it, except change your pages. The weighting of on-page factors is directly related to how your competitors' pages look and what works in one industry or for one keyword may not work as well for another.

While you can continually monitor the keyword densities of your competitors and where they put keywords in their head tags and on their pages, you will probably find that both your time and the time of your SEO is more wisely spent on providing clear, useful, focussed content that speaks to your customers using the same language they use to describe your products and services.

4) SEOs have no control over who links to you. The web is all about linking and if you want to link out to a site you find useful that is entirely up to you. In much the same way, if someone else wants to link to you then they can and should, provided they are not misrepresenting your site.

You cannot and should not worry too much about some scraper site or useless directory or other spam merchant showing up in your backlinks and these sites will not harm your rankings. The search engines are probably ignoring those links, your customers will not be finding you through those links and there are not enough hours in the day to chase up every single site of this sort to demand they take a link down, and even if there were time, they probably wouldn't do it. If for some reason someone does find you through one of those sites or a search engine decides one of those links should send you some authority, then consider it a bonus. Since search engines know that you cannot monitor every site that links to you, they do not expect you to do so.

5) SEOs have no control over what your competitors are doing. SEOs cannot control their PPC budget, or the amount of link building, link buying, viral marketing or linkbaiting they are doing in their own SEO campaign. Your SEO should take your competition into account and should be aiming to get you exposure in the same places that your competitors are visible, but if your competition is working to improve their own traffic and rankings at the same rate your SEO is working to improve your traffic and rankings then the most your SEO can do is to make sure that you have the best content and copy you possibly can and that they are pursuing inbound links from good, relevant sites and trust that your business outshines the competition.

6) SEOs have no control over the search engine results pages. If your SEO promises you a number one position or even a first page placing for any keyword then they are promising something they cannot guarantee. Good search engine optimisation is about making each and every page of your site as relevant for the right keywords as it can possibly be while building the authority and trust of your site through inbound links and effective search engine marketing. If your SEO does her job well then traffic and rankings should follow, but she has no magic button to press and no magic switch to flick which will guarantee that any search engine will do anything.

Labels: inbound links, on page optimisation, search engine optimisation, SEO, serps

By definition, Google PageRank is based on the number of inbound links to a page and the PageRank from the pages on which those links are placed. It is only a small factor in the way in which Google ranks sites now. Other factors such as LocalRank have far greater importance. For example, LocalRank is a more relevant figure because it is calculated based on links from related sites, so, in effect, it reflects how much other experts in your field respect your knowledge.

The Toolbar PageRank that you see is only updated at MOST every 3 months and is not an accurate reflection of overall PageRank. Google have claimed they play with the number showing on that bar just to see reactions in the SEO community. You need to monitor traffic and how much you get and for what types of keywords to see how you are doing within organic search. PageRank is only useful as a relative measure.

Furthermore, when fretting over how to increase your PageRank, you must remember that it increases exponentially so that you need 10x more link authority to get from PR1 to PR2, 100x more link authority to go from PR2 to PR3, 1000x more link authority to go from PR3 to PR4, etc., which means far too much time spent worrying about the sheer volume of links you will need and not enough worrying about getting links from sites that can give you relevant traffic. At the end of it, even if you have obtained your 1,000 or 10,000 new links, you still may find yourself outranked by a page with much lower PR because of on-page relevance or the number of people who follow their ranking and don’t bounce back into the search results page.

Personally, I would turn off the PR on your toolbar and pay it no attention and simply work on getting good, relevant links from sites you respect.

Labels: google maps, google toolbar, inbound links, link building, link popularity, local rank, PageRank