Angels Den Blog

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has become an obsession for businesses across the globe and throughout cyberspace—but do the spectacular claims made by its advocates stand up to analysis?

Since its very beginnings in the mid-1990s, SEO ‘experts’ (notice that I put this in quotation marks … just thought I’d point that out!) set themselves up as the people to go to if you wanted your online business to succeed. Just like the Wizard of Oz, they hid behind a curtain of mystery and misdirection—never quite letting on how they did what they did or knew what they knew —and they gained an almost unquestioning acceptance from the business world… For about 5 minutes, that is. After all, we would have to be stupid simply to accept what we’re told without the support of cold hard facts!

The SEO sector then entered a long dark period during which many distrusted its claims; others simply did not understand them—and only a few fell for my personal all-time favourite, “We can make you the #1 listing in Google”, which I sometimes still hear today and which still sends a shiver down my spine.

The SEO fraternity seemed to enjoy the status of warriors battling against the evil Google empire (and that of the other search engines, most of which are not really worth mentioning in comparison with the monopoly that Google has in the search market). SEO specialists were constantly trying to find ways of manipulating Google’s algorithms into accepting that their client’s websites were more important than they actually were. This tinkering with the truth and, sometimes, downright spamming represents what has more recently been called ‘black hat’ (unethical) SEO practices. These are seriously frowned on by search engines—which, quite frankly, can afford to have the best anti-SEO experts on their payroll to spot and penalise those who too obviously warp the system.

Remember: a search engine really only has one responsibility to its clients—that is, to return the most relevant information for the search term or phrase that was used. SEO manipulation of the search engine’s algorithms produces search lists that include only those firms that can spend the money to get to the top, so search engines spend a lot of time and money to make sure that their information is not influenced by outside forces.

Nowadays, SEO is all about ‘white hat’ (ethical) methods of optimising websites and blogs. It looks at the three fundamental elements that will determine your importance to Google (and the others, of course), as follows.

1. Is your website constructed correctly? Can search engines see every page that you want them to see? Has your site been made according to current web standards? What elements on your page are visible to search engines, etc? Your web developer should be able to complete this stage for you.

2. Are you an expert in your field? This is determined largely by the copy on your site. The optimisation of content in the visible and invisible elements of your page (that is, tags) is the job of the web copywriter, who creates the text with which to fill your perfectly developed website.
3. Do others recognise you as an expert in your field? It is generally accepted that this is evidenced by the number of incoming links that point towards your site (although the quality of the link is all-important, because most directories and article databases are now hardly worth their webspace).

So, can an SEO expert make you ‘the #1 listing’ in Google? Well, no. Not really. If they were able to do so, it would be probably be by using suspicious methods that could have you banned by the search engine (something that no business could possibly want to risk). A ‘good’ SEO specialist will, however, be able to adapt what you have into something that will present your business website in such a light as to increase its likelihood of attracting the interest of—and therefore the ranking by—search engines. A ‘good’ SEO specialist will tell you exactly what it will be doing and what results it hopes to achieve. And a ‘good’ SEO specialist will never claim that it can guarantee you a Google top spot. I’m afraid that whilst SEO is an essential promotional tool in your marketing arsenal, it is not the be all and end all of online promotion; rather, it is just one important detail to get right.

Author: Bill Morrow of Angels Den—where entrepreneurs and investors meet.

If you’re looking to set up an online business, you might consider talking to the chaps at www.scribbles-writing-services.co.uk for copy-based SEO advice. And if your business could benefit from a cash injection to launch or develop a product, or to build on its current success, then why not visit www.angelsden.co.uk to see how our angel investors could give your business the boost it needs and deserves.