Shuffle - SEO UK

In October of 2009, John C. Dvorak wrote an article for PC Magazine where he basically said that SEO does not work and is the modern version of snake oil. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2340694,00.asp

Mr. Dvorak is not the only one who feels that SEO is no more than empty promises. I’ve heard it plenty of times before: hire an SEO company and you’re wasting your money; you should just focus on creating great, high-quality content and the rest will follow; “SEO experts” are modern snake oil salesmen, stay away from them.

My short answer to the question “Does SEO work?” is “Yes, SEO works.” Mr. Dvorak was wrong. Yes, when he changed his blog’s URLs from the default WordPress numbered links to “pretty” permalinks containing keywords, he saw a decline in traffic. That’s because when you change a large number of old URLs, you lose your existing rankings and any links pointing to those URL and need to rebuild them. So if there was a SEO fiasco, it was created by Mr. Dvorkin’s actions rather than by SEO principles.

SEO works because it enables search engine spiders to effectively crawl your content and index it correctly. High quality content is an important part of your Web marketing – but if you don’t adhere to simple SEO principles, you won’t reach your full potential in terms of traffic and audience.

SEO is not about cheating or playing tricks on readers and on search engines. On the contrary, SEO – white hat, ethical SEO done by a reputable SEO company is about making sure that the right content is delivered to the right audience. When you optimise your pages for search engines, you are helping search engine companies to reach their most important goal of serving the most relevant content to their users, and you are helping users to find the content they are looking for. SEO is a good thing – for your company, for Internet users and for search engine companies.

Let me give you an example. Let’s assume your company sells baby gifts. Obviously, your goal is that when someone enters the term, or the keyword, “baby gifts” into the search engine search box, your company’s Web site will come up as one of the first results, so that people can click over and check your products out.

But if you don’t hire a quality SEO company to help you implement basic search engine optimisation techniques, there’s a good chance that search engine bots will have no way of knowing that your site sells baby gifts. You need to tell them what your site is about through the text on your pages, through your Web site tags (especially the title tags) and – hopefully – via links sent to your site from external sites using “baby gifts” as their anchor text. But if you don’t optimise, and your homepage’s title tag simply says “home” and there’s very little text on your site’s pages, as is the case with many e-commerce sites, then your site will NOT rank well for the keyword “baby gifts” and no one will find it through search.

You will still have other ways of marketing your Web site, of course, including SEM (paid search engine marketing, also known as PPC) and traditional advertising, but those are typically much more expensive than SEO.

So yes, SEO works. Its basic principles are easy to understand and to apply, and not optimising simply doesn’t make sense – why would you not use this wonderful, cost-effective marketing technique? Just remember that you need to consult with a reputable SEO company before making any drastic changes to your Website, and that SEO results are not instantaneous and take time – at least six months or even longer – to become apparent.