There’s a lot of misinformation about Search Engine Optimisation floating about, attributed to the secrecy of the search engines, and the fact that one can not take a BCom in SEO.

So if the concept of search engine optimisation is new to you, the following might give you a better idea of the optimisation process and help you avoid the snake oil salesman.

1. SEO is not condemmed or even frowned upon by the search engines

They want to present the best results to their users but often due to a badly structured site, or a poor developer, they can find it hard to index and rank a website’s content. The first job of of an SEO is usually cleaning up the mess created by the company that built the website.

Google says the following about hiring an SEO:

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

2. You don’t need to submit your website to search engines

They’ll find you by following links from other website. Any SEO company that tells you they’ll submit your site to 5000 search engines is selling you snake oil. The major 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) make up over 95% of the market in English speaking countries – and Google has a market share of 89% in New Zealand (source: Hitwise July 2008).

3. No SEO company can guarantee you a number #1 ranking

Google takes into account over 100 factors when deciding where to rank websites. For this reason rankings cannot be bought, or guaranteed. SEO is the process of optimising your website to as many of these factors as possible, but there’s no silver bullet that can definativly rank a website in the #1 position. You can’t buy rankings in the organic results, and often SEO’s promising #1 positions will buy the top spot on the advertising side of the search results (the right), which gets a lot less attention from users.

4. SEO is not about about meta keyword tags, keyword stuffing or keyword density

When early SEO’s first started manipulating search engine rankings back in the late 90′s, things were pretty easy. Search engines ranked sites based on their meta information, so all you needed to was to repeat your targeted keyword over and over again in your meta keyword tag and you could rank pretty well. As search engines have got smarter over the years they have started to look at other factors that are harder to game – things that give relevant signals about what a particular page is about on your website.

The same goes for repeating your keywords over and over again on the page. For example you’ll often see something like this on a website:



It’s an easy signal for search engines to detect, and will likely get your site penalised. Search engines are smarter then that.