Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)’ Category

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Duplicate Content Penalty Remedies

June 18, 2008

There is much concern amongst website owners that their website pages may be dropped or that severe penalties will be imposed on their rankings if Google detects that there is duplicate content. This is, to some degree, a misnomer. Read more to understand the impact that duplicate content has on your Google rankings.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content means that there is a substantial amount of repeated content that matches rather closely (or exactly) with other content either on the same website or across multiple websites on the Internet. Duplicate content often occurs unintentionally and with no ill intentions to trick the search engines.  Some websites have the same or similar pieces of content within one domain, other company’s innocently enter into shared content partnership as a business strategy, and company’s are increasingly syndicating their website articles to multiple article banks and publisher websites as part of their Web PR strategy.

Sadly though, there are instances where content is duplicated across multiple domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or where content is simply plagiarized by other website owners with the intention of claiming credit for the content.  These issues are addressed below and as far as possible; a suggestive remedy has been included.

What is a duplicate content penalty?

A duplicate content penalty is not really a ‘penalty’ as such. You will not be penalised or dropped from the Google index for having duplicate content on your own website, or sharing content with another website, however you should be aware that only one page get’s the credit for the content. In other words, the page that is first indexed for the content by Google is the one who usually receives the ‘credit’ for it.  All that really means is that the duplicated content may not show up in the Google search results.

Remember that the purpose of a search engine is to provide the most relevant and unique content to the browsers. Therefore, not every duplicated page should get displayed in the search results. This also protects website owners against having their stolen content rank higher than the original content.  So to prevent Google’s users from seeing the same duplicated content they have created duplicate content filters to detect pages that are already indexed.

How to remedy duplicate content issues?

Duplicate pages on your own website:

If you have a page that sells ‘new boats’ for instance, and another page that sells ‘used boats’, however the general marketing copy is very much the same except for the word ‘new’ or ‘used’ that alternates, then don’t go into a panic thinking that you will be penalised for this. The very worst that will happen is that possibly only the ‘new boats’ page (or alternatively, only the ‘used boats’ page) will get credited for the content. In other words, only the one page will show up in the search results when searching for a phrase ‘new or used boats’.   

How to best remedy this: Make sure that your similar pages are at least 60% different (different words, page titles, headlines, hyperlinks and images).  Another scenario is when you have a printer version of the same content. In this instance you should rather direct the search engines to index the preferred (original) content as opposed to the print version. If you leave the search engine to decide the most relevant page, it may display the print version in the search results instead. You can disallow the printer versions from being indexed in your robots.txt file. You can also use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to redirect both the search engines and human visitors to the preferred page.

Republished pages (articles) on other websites:

If you have created an article or press release and have distributed it to other website owners or article banks to be published, you could stand the risk of them being indexed for your content instead of your own website ranking for the same content.

How to best remedy this: Makes sure that your articles or press releases appear on your own website first. Submit this page to the search engines (e.g.: www.google.com/addurl/) and then check that the page is indexed by the search engines before you submit it to other websites to be published.  If you are syndicating your content you should make absolutely sure that you include a link to your web page where the original content resides to ensure that your content benefits from the back links to your website, ultimately giving the original page a higher PageRank.

Sharing your content through white labeling:

Many website owners go into affiliate partnerships where they agree to share the content on their website with other websites to be published under a white label (where the content is served by the owner onto another publishers website surrounded by the other website’s look and feel under a sub-domain). The problem with this relationship is that quite often the white labeled website gets indexed by the search engines and could ranks higher on the search results than the original website (owner of the content).  As a result, the owner may drop down the rankings and the sub-domain appears higher, ultimately decreasing the original website’s rankings in the search results.

How to best remedy this: As the content is shared under ‘multiple domains’ it is regarded by Google as duplicate content. There are two options that you could consider here. The first option is to ask each of the affiliates (partners) to block the duplicate pages (sub-domain only and not the root domain) from being indexed by the spiders in the robots.txt, however this may be a little difficult if all sub-domain’s point to the same file.  The second option is to dynamically create a meta noindex, follow in the head of the respective pages.  Another consideration is if other sites link to yours using both the www and non-www version of your URLs, you can notify Google as to which domain you would prefer to have indexed by utilising Google’s Webmaster tools.

Plagiarized and scraped content:

Unfortunately there may be times when competitors scrape your content from your website to republish it as their own.  This could provide reason for concern regarding duplicate content with the fear of the competitor getting credit for what is actually your content. Don’t stress too much as it is highly unlikely that this deviant act could impact negatively on your own website’s ranking on Google.

How to best remedy this: You can file a complaint with Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act to re-claim ownership of your content.  To detect duplicate content make use of Copyscape’s Website plagiarism search tool.

The best advice that I can offer in terms of duplicate content issues is simply to be aware of it and become mindful on the measures that can be implemented to ensure that both the search engines as well as the user receive the most relevant and most unique content when searching for information.

  

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Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008

January 5, 2008

Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates.  Social and search marketing is clearly leading the way together with email & mobile marketing, website optimisation and Web PR strategies. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.   

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

  1. Optimise your website’s content
  2. Create a content development strategy for your website
  3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
  4. Publicise your website through article marketing
  5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
  6. Create a Company Blog
  7. Experiment with video marketing
  8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
  9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
  10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

1.  Optimise your website’s content

First and foremost, get your website content right.  Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines.  An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.  To ensure that the content is being indexed correctly by search engines, it is essential that a number of variables are applied correctly to each article, press release, media announcement, promotional copy or information content that is placed on the website.  SEO copywriting techniques should be applied to all content.

Benefit of Optimised Content:-

  • Ensures that your website is identified as a subject matter expert
  • Creates unique, relevant and superior content
  • Prevents duplicate content
  • Encourages correct page architecture
  • Ensures correct theme alignment of related content
  • Increases Search Engines Rankings for targeted keywords
  • Increases traffic to the website
  • Increases customers
  • Increases turnover

2.  Create a content development strategy for your website

In addition to optimising the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis.  All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimised for the search engines.  A website should acquire an adequate number of pages related to the specific subject matter in order to be seen as an expert in the specific industry.  The more frequently the website’s content is updated, the more frequently search engines will be able to spider and index the website appropriately and apply a suitable ranking to the websites individual pages of content.  

Benefits of Increasing Website Pages:-

  • Ensures that the company is identified as a subject matter expert
  • Encourages more frequent spidering by Search Engines
  • Creates more opportunities (pages) for Search Engines to rank
  • Increases content offered to visitors
  • Creates additional content for theme alignment
  • Improves inbound linking strategy
  • Offers additional opportunities for internal and external linking

3.  Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website.  Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

Benefits of Paid Search Advertising:-

  • Can achieve top ranking through paid search if not ranking through natural search
  • It’s non-intrusive as you are reaching people when they are actively looking for information about your products and services online
  • Send targeted visitors directly to your offering on your website
  • Increases brand awareness
  • Keeps your competitors off the pages
  •  It’s scalable and controllable and you only pay when people click on your
  • You can appear on search engines almost immediately

4.  Publicise your website through article marketing

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicise your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content.  To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Prior to submitting articles the content should optimised for search engines.  By submitting different versions of the article there is far more chance that pages displaying your article will avoid relegation, will maintain and grow Page Rank, and maintain the status of a high-quality non-duplicated content page.  Each article should be published on your own website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.  

Benefit of Article Marketing:-

  • The more articles you write, the more web sites will choose to publish your articles online, the more inbound links your site will receive
  • More back links from articles increases the value, meaning that ranking in search
  • Published pages have a higher Page Rank
  • Generates long-term traffic directly as well as boosts your search engine rankings
  • Enhances your reputation and credibility as a subject matter expert 

5.  Develop a social media marketing strategy

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place.  Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy.   Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation.  SMO will continue to get broader use from marketers interested in building traffic and buzz online, moving far beyond linking strategy and smart SEO into the marketing mainstream. 

One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential increase in the amount of content online.  This will continue to lead online users to search beyond the algorithm for new ways of finding information.  A key method for this is where people are sorting content on the web, creating their own groupings and sharing that with others.   It is important that you continuously engage with social communities through reaching out to social communities to bring attention to your company or brand.  It is an effective means of off-site optimisation for your company’s website and ensures that your website is optimised for a broad range of content in every applicable media or vertical niche.   

Benefit of Social Media Marketing:-

  • Brings attention to your brand
  • Creates instant exposure
  • More visibility for your company
  • Encourages repeat visitors and shared content
  • Improves search engine rankings 
  • Strengthens your brand within a targeted or niche community
  • Increases back links to your website
  • Drives additional traffic to the website 

6.  Create a Company Blog

In the past, corporates have been focusing marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless.  This has changes significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality.  More and more companies are starting to realise the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive.  Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.   Companies should focus more time on establishing new touch points for customers to interact with the true personality of a brand.   Allowing your employees to Blog on your company Blog has many advantageous. 

Benefits of a Company Blog:-

  • Blogs are search engine traffic magnets
  • Positions your company to be a thought leader in your industry
  • Gives you the power to publish at an instant making it a very powerful update tool and great for crisis handling
  • Helps to build relationships with customers by engaging in conversation with them
  • Provides an avenue for your to solicit feedback from your customers
  • Puts a human voice to the company
  • Encourages you to find out what others are saying about your company 

7.  Experiment with video marketing

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. Although South African companies still struggle with the bandwidth issue, globally video sharing has become increasingly popular.  Companies that provide the ability to syndicate your viral videos to Video Sharing websites will grow in popularity. 

As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing. As broadband penetrations increases in South Africa, streaming video will start to become a very popular marketing tool.  Whether a B2B or B2C marketer, video is an enormous opportunity to engage, educate and entertain.  Many brands are producing instructional videos to help customers install or use their product or service. Others create pure entertainment, hoping to build brand affinity or drive traffic to their website.

Benefits of a Video Marketing:-

  • It is usually free to post video’s to video sharing websites
  • Video’s are included in search engine results and usually receive high rankings
  • Provides you with an opportunity to engage with your customer in an entertaining manner
  • You are able to show the benefits of your products or service through visual education
  • Increases the viral marketing potential for your business 

8.  Engage your audiences with web widget marketing

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months.  Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.    Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online. Audiences are becoming immersed in websites that provide cool and interactive marketing messages and companies have to find innovative ways to engage with these consumers. 

Web Widget Marketing will help companies keep up with its audiences and stay abreast of consumers, or at least stay ahead of competitors.   Web widgets cannot simply deliver an advertising message; it has to be a practical extension of the company’s brand.  It should provide a highly usefully application that is able to demonstrate the brand’s unique offering and can deliver on that promise. 

 Benefits of Web Widget Marketing:-

  • Widgets are cool, slick and playful
  • They spread quickly on Blogs and social network profiles
  • Combines the power of brand propagation with interactive content and transactions
  • Provides a platform for companies to introduce new products or services to an audience
  • Creates an online connection with customers
  • Can provide unprecedented access to hard-to-reach targets
  • Offers branded entertainment to an audience

9.  Discover the benefits of mobile media marketing

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognise the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that there websites are mobile-friendly.   The mobile phone is a device on which we find all the traditional forms of advertising such as print, image and voice, wrapped into one small but widely used device. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.  

Benefits of Mobile Marketing:-

  • Mobile campaigns are relatively easy to create and fast to execute
  • Delivery of SMS messages to mobile phones is almost guaranteed
  • You can market your messages to consumer mobile devices anytime and anywhere
  • Text messages or personalised content is targeted to individuals who have opted to receive them
  • Encourages viral marketing with the built-in tools for forwarding of the messages to the existing social networks 

10.  Create an effective email marketing strategy

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.   

You should focus on developing a strategy that combines a highly functional website with the power of direct-to-consumer email communications.  It is important to develop a close-loop strategy that incorporates careful planning, testing, execution and measurement of the success of your email marketing campaigns.   

Benefits of Email Marketing:-

  • Increases lead generation and cross selling
  • Increases customer lifetime value
  • Low cost, instantaneous channel for sending messages
  • Opens up a two-way dialogue with customers and prospects
  • Hypercharges your existing marketing messages
  • Instant, measurable results 

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!

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Top 10 SEO Ranking Criteria

October 15, 2007

Search Engine Analysts around the world believe that (although Google does not reveal the answers) the following Top 10 criteria are most likely to assist you in achieving better Search Engine Rankings and improved placement on Search Engine Results Pages:

  1. Keyword in Title Tags
  2. Global Link Popluarity of Site
  3. Anchor Text of inbound links
  4. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
  5. Age of Site
  6. Topical relevance of invound links to site
  7. Link popularity of site in topical communities (Social Media Optimisation)
  8. Keyword use in body text (frequency, distribution and density)
  9. Global link popularity of linking site
  10. Topical relationship of linking pages (theme alignment)

This information was obtained from the SEOMoz Survey 2007.

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Good Linking Strategies for Improved Search Engine Rankings

October 3, 2007

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the latest buzz word amongst webmasters and internet marketers. Everyone’s competing for that top spot on the search engine results page, but with so many racing to overtake the one in front of them, website owners are becoming desperate and are ‘clutching at straws’ to try to beat their competitors.What Constitutes A Good Linking Strategy?

A good linking strategy comprises of three core parts: Internal links (links within a website to related content), Inbound Links (links from other websites citing your website) and External Links (links from your website to external authority or expert websites whose content compliments your own.Internal Links

Before embarking on a search engine ranking project for your website, ensure that you have given substantial thought to your linking strategy. Ensure that you have created a strong layer of generic landing pages and carefully align these pages vertically or horizontally to the relevant themes ensuring that the important keywords or key phrases that have been selected for those themed pages are distributed across the page in a natural, spam-free manner.

External Links Too many websites are creating pages with hundreds of external links to other top ranking or authoritative websites. Google will only count the first 100 links, so anything more than that is not going to be considered. Search Engines place emphasis on websites that are considered authority websites (or experts) and as such, when linking to an external website it is more important to establish if the website is in a clean neighbourhood (not on a server with other blocklisted websites) and more importantly, that this website does not participate in linking farms.


Inbound Links

Similarly, it is imperative to establish exactly who links to you. When websites offer to link to your website – or simply just link to your website without you even knowing – find out if these sites have a clean record and are not involved in link-farming or live on bad servers. When a good clean authority website offers to ‘cite’ you on their website, accept the link and request that they link to you using your keywords or key phrases as part of their anchor text.

Linking MythsThere are a number of ‘myths’ that are still being tired and tested by website owners every day. Link swapping is just one of them. It is alarming to still find so many website owners (and top publishers) offering to barter a link swap as part of their so-called ‘linking strategy’. A quality linking strategy is just one of the very strong legs that will keep a good website ranked highly on search engines. Experienced SEO analysts such as Bruce Clay has confirmed that, although link swapping may not get you blacklisted, it certainly won’t help your rankings either. The internal link simply cancels out the external link to the same website.

Another popular technique practiced so frequently by website owners these days is to buy as many links as they can on other websites with high page ranking. (This is the ranking that Google gives to pages out of 10 in order to demonstrate the overall importance of a website. A high ranking out of 10 does not necessarily help a website’s rankings). Search Engines (such as Google) are highly intelligent and can identify when a link exists on a website that is predominantly seen by its spider as an advertising website, and as a result it automatically assumes that this link has been paid for thereby offering little or not credit as part of the websites ranking score. Unfortunately this too does not help a website’s ranking on search engines. It is not about how many highly ranked pages you can link to, but rather about how many quality websites you cite and how many authority websites are citing you.

© Copyright Blue Magnet Web Intellect

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Search Engine Friendly Copywriting

October 3, 2007

Gone are the days when journalists are commissioned to write grammatically correct copy for websites.   What website owners tend to forget ever so often, is that search engines are not humans. They do not see images and certainly do not read words the way that humans do.  It is our job as Internet Marketers to help search engines read our websites.

To come up in a search results you need to ensure that you have considered all relevant criteria that makes up the very complex algorithms used by search engines in order to decide who is most relevant and who gets to rank highest.   There are a number of criteria that internet marketers and website owners need to take into consideration for ranking; however one of the most important areas is writing copy that is search friendly and rich in keywords or key phrases. SEO copy writing requires writing content that search engines see as relevant, unique and meaningful.  Here are some guidelines to writing search friend, keyword rich copy:

  • Start by writing your copy normally, so that it makes sense to you.
  • Create a list of keywords and key phrases you believe people might type into the bidorbuy search bar, or search engine’s search bars (such as Google).
  • Choose one or two most important key phrases rather than individual keywords as there is too much competition for single words.
  • Add these key phrases or keywords to the title, with the most important words towards the front.
  • In addition to the title, add a heading (HTML – H1) to your copy and include the key phrase or keyword in the heading as well.
  • Surround your keywords or key phrases with similar or related words (stick to a theme).
  • Add your keywords or keyword phrases to the main body copy in places where they have a natural fit (with minimal disruption to sentence structure).   Don’t repeat key phrases too many times and try to ensure that you have distributed your keywords evenly across the page.
  • If you are writing copy for an information or research page make sure that you have a large amount of content (over 400 words at minimum) on the page.  However, if writing for shopping sites, keep your copy short and use bullet points and lists as opposed to paragraphs.  
  • Use <strong> as opposed to <bold> to place emphasis on your keywords or key phrases.
  • Create a hyperlink from your key phrases or key words to link directly to other similar pages of content on your website.
  • Mesh singular and plural terms together on the same page.
  •  Use synonyms for your keywords or key phrases where possible.  

Here are some guidelines on spamming (‘blackhat’) techniques to avoid:

  • Don’t overdo it.  Don’t stuff keywords into your descriptions in a manner that does not make sense to the reader (user).
  • Your copy must look ‘real’ (natural) and not appear to be ‘spamming’ the site.
  • Never use white text on a white background.
  • Stuffing keywords into images is regarded as spamming.  A reasonable text description (doing exactly that i.e. explaining the image in text) is acceptable.
  • Do not place hidden text in your code that is displayed above the page (i.e. can be read in your code by a spider, but cannot be seen on the page by the user.

Always ensure that your copy is real and looks natural to ensure that you do not appear to bespamming the website.  If you attempt to fool the search engines, you stand a very good chance of being dropped or blacklisted by them.  Remember, although you are writing copy to be seen by robotic spiders, you still have an end user to consider – your customer.  No matter how well ranked you are by a search engine, if your customer does not get what he or she wants from your site, they’ll click right out and continue searching for someone else – your competitor.

© Copyright Blue Magnet Web Intellect

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Search Engine and Social Media Optimisation a Reality!

October 3, 2007

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the latest buzz word amongst webmasters and marketers.  Everyone’s competing for that top spot on the search engine results page, but with so many racing to overtake the one in front of them, website owners are becoming desperate and are ‘clutching at straws’ to try to beat their competitors. 

We have barely digested the term SEO and already we’re hearing new jargon such as SMO (Social Media Optimisation) creeping in.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is simply a preview of things to come on the web. It’s already here and pioneering companies have already grasped the concept and are ensuring that their internet marketing strategy extends beyond traditional e-Marketing and into the area of Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Advertising and Social Media Optimisation.

Pioneering companies will win:

Sadly, few South African companies realise the significance of optimising their websites for top search engine rankings and social popularity.  There are many extraordinary looking websites being launched onto the Internet daily, yet their splashy entry pages and dazzling creative’s seldom does the company any good. These websites occupy space on the web; however they are by no means optimised to attract the correct target audiences. Few web designers are taught the skill of optimising the websites that they design for search engine rankings.  From the start of the web development project, companies should commission experienced search engine marketers or analysts to be involved in preparing the website brief for the developer by defining the essential elements that should be incorporated, if the website is to be positioned anywhere of significance on search engine results pages.

There are more than a hundred varying criteria that search engines include as part of their ranking algorithm. Website owners, web designers and marketers should take cognisance of the fact that it is simply not good enough to publish a fancy looking website onto the Internet and expect it to start attracting and converting customers in the hope of producing income from its online presence.  It takes skill and careful planning to create a website that will be recognised by search engines as relevant enough to rank in the top ten results, and then to take this one step further by ensuring that the user experience is one that will convert a researcher into a customer.  And remember the modern customer is one that is in control.

Today’s consumer is in control:

The new consumer is actively participating in social networks, they are bookmarking websites on social search engines and they are blogging about you. Ensure that your website is optimised to generate publicity through social media, online communities and social networks.  There are websites that consist of user generated ranking systems.  Make sure that your website can be bookmarked, linked to and tagged easily enough by the user.  Create a company blog or user community within your own website.  If you create something that allows your user to engage with you, and it is compelling enough for them to spread the word and to bookmark you then you are half way there.

You can’t fake it until you make it:

Getting ranked highly on search engine results is not a quick fix. It is a process that requires a great deal of planning, editing and monitoring in order to first climb into the top ranking positions and then to try to remain there.  With the algorithms changing at will, there is no one technique ‘cast in stone’ that will guarantee top rankings.  If you want to reap the rewards, you need to invest time and effort into properly researching your competitor’s position, and then carefully plan a strategy that will hopefully outrank them, while at the same time attracting the long tail. Beware of companies promising to have websites ranked in the top ten results pages within weeks.  Although some websites do rank much faster than others, those companies practicing spamming techniques may get websites ranking in a matter of weeks but, in return they can expect to be dropped from the rankings – or even worse, be blacklisted by the search engines within as little as six weeks.

Companies should be careful to approach search engine optimisation from an ethical – spam free – perspective if they want to thrive in this very competitive environment.  Until such time that a website ranks highly, there certainly is a place for paid advertising (pay-per-click).

Blue Magnet has launched a one day Search Engine Marketing training course that teaches the skill of Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation.  The courses are interactive and the content is easily understood by non-techies, marketers and web designers.

(c) Copyright Blue Magnet Web Intellect