By Stewart Baines, 17 June 2009 09:00
COMMENT
Â… have strong links to other sites, and by strong I mean inbound links from other sites relevant to your business (and most definitely not from a 'link farm' - a collection of sites that all link to every other site in the group - a 'blackhat' technique).
Other factors are important too: sites that are regularly updated attract the spiders more often and so will help to boost the position in the search rankings; personal details feed into the algorithm, as does the use of keywords within the page (do they correspond with your outbound links, meta tags and headlines?) and so on.
Fine-tuning your website to optimise these can be a very long and expensive process, especially considering SEO experts have only observed evidence to base their expertise upon. In other words, they have seen what they believe works and what doesn't but they don't know actually know why.
This may be an acceptable activity for large companies that can dedicate resources to SEO but many smaller companies probably have never even heard of it.
A recent BT Business survey of more than 70,000 websites found that only one in 3,000 are using keywords, only one in 130 are using code in their site to make them visible to the search engine spiders, and just 11 per cent update their website every couple of days.
Doubtlessly those that are updating do so for product updates rather than SEO but it does highlight how much web marketing is not a level playing field.
Stay tuned for our next column in which we'll cover how much you should trust SEO, and offer tips on how to make your site easier for searchers to find.
Stewart Baines is a director of Futurity Media, a leading technology marketing consultancy. Stewart's background is in journalism and industry analysis with expertise in collaboration, communications and green IT. Over the past 10 years, Futurity Media has worked with some of the biggest names in the technology business. Futurity Media's philosophy is simple: take complex technologies and make them accessible to a business audience. To find out more about Futurity Media's approach, go to www.futuritymedia.com
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