With the current economic recession biting hard, many respected website owners plan to use the internet as a long term strategy in order to advertise their business. So why would they select Search Engine Optimization you may ask? Quite clearly, it is the most cost effective option in the process of improving the amount of good quality traffic to a website from a Search Engine. The main function of a Search Engine Optimiser is to achieve and hold the highest possible ranking position for a website on the main Search Engines. In order to do this, the SEO will use keyword selection; that is words or phrases appropriate to the firm to be promoted, and chosen by them and their SEO using well planned systems. These well picked Keywords will lead to a number of promotion methods including on page, off page and behind page optimization in order for that website to popularity and weight within Search Engines. Ethical SEO’s will constantly use these methods to conduct this online marketing as they respect their client’s long term reputation. Be careful, there are many Unethical SEO’s in the market place. They will offer a short term method and more often than not, their systems result in Search Engines lowering a website’s ranking or eradicating the listings from their databases altogether.

A recent consumer survey has indicated that shoppers are deserting the more old fashioned methods and are actually using the web to buy their goods and services. This influx of new searchers brings with it the need for Search Engines to deliver fast and efficient search results. These results therefore are very much dependent on website owners selecting their keywords and keyword phrases very cautiously in order for the SEO to conduct their work.

So, who reaps the benefits from Ethical Search Engine Placement? Search Engines, do they satisfy the requirements of their searchers? Searchers, do they find exactly what they are looking for? The SEO, do they gain long term clients? The website owner, do they achieve the needed results and new business they set out to benefit? The truth is that everyone benefits – it is a win win state of affairs with everyone’s respect gained and reputations built.

This positive benefiting by all parties concerned means that the ethical process makes certain long term business for all as well. The website owning client is very happy, he is getting relevant, good quality enquiries from his website. The SEO is getting decent feedback from this client and at the very least remains a long term customer. The searcher will stick with the search engine that provided him such an appropriate referral and this in turn means the engine will value the SEO, and boost his credibility – simple!

One misconception is that the SEO companies must trick the search engines into showing companies on the first page of the search results. Any honest business owner, when hearing this would probably decide that if some form of deceit is involved that the service is not one in which they would consider investing in. Ethical search engine optimization is the best way to operate and any business doing so is actually well regarded by the search engines as they are being helped in their endeavours. The job of the search engine is to join searchers up with websites that give them with what they are looking for. As long as the SEO Company works towards this objective too there is no element of trickery involved.

Another false belief is that you can obtain keyword exclusivity for the right money. This is not the case. No search engine offers this service and any website owner is able to select any keyword he or she chooses to help the search engines draw clients to the site. There is certainly competition in terms of advertising those keywords and often companies will both have the same ones and be competing for decent Search Engine Placement positions on them but no one business can buy the right to any of them. The search engine optimisation companies will attempt to ensure you are positioned high on the list but everyone is at liberty to “have a go” at any particular keyword or phrase.

Another falsehood is that the services are expensive. Of course this is all relative and if one was to compare the optimization costs to say, a small advertisement in a free locally distributed newspaper then of course the cost would look very high undeniably. On the other hand if you could compare the cost to the sum that would need to be spent in newspaper advertising to realise the same amount of business as provided by the optimization itself then the cost would be very positive. Of course the need to spend relies on the business requiring, and being able to cope with the large amount of extra business brought in.

Finally a misconception which catches out a lot of businesses is the conviction that most web designers can actually carry out the optimization process for you themselves. Whilst it is true a small number can actually do this, in the main it is something that the web designer can only do the very early stages of at best. Their skills lie in the programming and layout of the web pages and in the way in which the site interfaces with the internal systems that the company uses. They are generally capable of getting some of the keywords into the coding but this is such a small, albeit crucial part of the process that must occur. Those businesses leaving optimization to their web designer will more often than not be very disappointed in the results.

If these and other opinions of the search engine optimization companies can be overcome more businesses will find it easier to make use of Online Marketing in the form of search engine optimization.

With the current economic recession biting hard, many respected website owners have decided to use the internet as a long term approach in order to promote their organization. So why would they opt for Search Engine Optimization you may ask? Quite clearly, it is the most cost effective package in the process of improving the volume of good quality visitors to a site from a Search Engine. The main role of a Search Engine Optimiser is to achieve and hold the highest possible ranking position for a website on the major. In order to do this, the SEO will use keyword selection; that is words or phrases related to the organization to be marketed, and chosen by them and their SEO using well planned processes. These well chosen Keywords will lead to a number of promotion methods including on page, off page and behind page optimization in order for that website to gain popularity and importance within Search Engines. Ethical SEO’s will at all times use these methods to perform this online marketing as they value their client’s long term reputation. Be careful, there are lots of Unethical SEO’s in the market place. They will offer a short term method and more often than not, their methods result in Search Engines lowering a website’s ranking or eliminating the listings from their databases altogether.

A recent consumer survey has highlighted that shoppers are leaving the more traditional methods and are actually using the web to purchase their goods and services. This surge of new searchers brings with it the need for Search Engines to deliver fast and efficient search results. These results therefore are very much reliant on website owners choosing their keywords and keyword phrases very cautiously in order for the SEO to carry out their work.

So, who wins from Ethical Search Engine Placement? Search Engines, do they meet the needs of their searchers? Searchers, do they find precisely what they are looking for? The SEO, do they achieve long term clients? The website owner, do they achieve the necessary results and new business they set out to benefit? The truth is that everyone benefits – it is a win win set of circumstances with everyone’s respect gained and reputations built.

This positive benefiting by all parties concerned means that the ethical procedure makes certain long term business for all as well. The website owning client is very content, he is getting appropriate, good quality leads from his website. The SEO is getting decent feedback from this client and at the very least stays as a long term client. The searcher will stick with the search engine that provided him such an appropriate referral and this in turn means the engine will value the SEO, and improve his credibility – ideal!

It is through the growth and alteration of these marketing systems that we can start to see the pros and the cons in the marketing world. With any kind of advertising there is typically a price but with the online market this is greatly reduced due to the fact that online products can be very cheap (many being free). In the technological era there are many different ways to make use of the internet but one of the major ways people seem to use the internet is through the use of web-based search engines. This is the searching of an online database for certain websites via the use of search criteria. This is an effective way of finding websites that you do not necessarily know the URL of, and allows the user of the search engine to discover new websites that have detail on the information that they are looking for. This “mass-use” of search engines means that they are ideal for marketing if used properly. The best use of search engines for marketing is called Search Engine Placement. This is the advertising of your website by making is appear at the head of the results list when relevant criteria are typed into the search engine. Search Engine Placement is done via including keywords on your website and the keywords used when registering your website to the search engines database.

The positioning of the keywords on your website is something that although easy to do can be something that is done wrongly (making it ineffective). This is where you might decide to use a company such as an Search Engine Optimization Company. SEO (Search engine optimisation) businesses are companies that have expert knowledge of the way in which search engines run and how best to market a website using them. An SEO Company can help advertise your organisation, not only assisting with choice of specific keywords but also through the positioning of those keywords too. With any luck the proper placement of keywords on your website will increase the business to the site, thus increasing business and in the end revenue.

But what are the best bits and problems of online advertising? Online marketing is straightforward and can be done by anybody but for fully effective marketing it would be wise to employ someone to help. This may seem like it defeats the point of online marketing, in that it costs, but it is less costly than other forms of advertising.

Online Marketing: Promotion for your business so as to attract new, and keep existing, “customers” using the web.

So how does one go about promoting their business online? Online marketing can be achieved through many different techniques such as viral marketing and buying advertising space on different popular websites such as Google and Cnet.com. Viral advertising can be done in a number of ways, all of them – regrettably – involve many man-hours to instigate and carry-out. This makes viral advertising less well liked, unless the product of the business being advertised is sure to make the business a profit and is certain to be worth it. This kind of viral and online promotion has been seen in the past with films like The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and The Dark Knight. These used intricate websites that left clues for the wiewers of such movies, so that they could work out plots and sub-plots and learn things about the film before it was released in cinemas. This sort of advertising works very well when a lot time, effort and money are invested but the advertising best suited to the general public is probably the purchasing of advertising space on well known websites.

Another way of advertising and using online marketing to your advantage is the use of something called Search Engine Placement. This is the utilization of popular search engines like Google and Ask to boost the popularity of your business. Said search engines use keywords from the search data entered to find the most fitting website for that specific user’s entry. One way of exploiting these search engines is by using these keywords on your site so that when searched for, your website has a better chance of coming up on the search-results list. This type of Search Engine Placement is useful so as to get your business higher on the search engine, thus getting your business viewed by more and more people throughout the world. This should get your business more and more customers and should result in more profit.

One way to utilise search engine optimisation is through the use of an SEO Company. An SEO company (meaning, search engine optimisation company) is used to assist with the carrying out of certain techniques to place your website higher on the search-list results page of a search engine website. This is done by the addition of relevant keywords on the home page of the website so that these keywords are located when certain search criteria are used. This is something that is usually attempted by the business in the first place but without the appropriate information and expertise the keywords are normally either not correctly identified or not correctly used in such a way so as to optimise the website. So with the correct usage of an SEO company, optimisation of the site can happen and the best possible way to benefit from online marketing and search engine placement can take place, helping your business compete in the fickle world that is the online market.

Direct e-mail can be successful as a way of obtaining repeat business from a known customer, but is no good for the initial contact. To be able to make that initial contact would require obtaining a list of e-mail addresses, and there are many ways of doing so, but this can be ineffective because of the spam and junk mail filters built in to all mail services nowadays. Unsolicited mail frequently goes unread.

Banner advertising can work when placed on the right host website. However banners are often ignored and can be considered a nuisance. A badly placed banner or sidebar advert can interfere with the intended operation of a site, even something as widely used as MSN’s Hotmail. Though that bad positioning is the responsibility of the owning site it does not do the advertiser any favours.

Pop-up sites are still used by some companies but it cannot be that effective when the first tool that every Internet Service Provider supplies is a pop-up blocker.

Greater numbers of potential customers are using search engines like Google and Yahoo to find the source of goods and services. Achieving a high Search Engine Placement is increasingly important.

A Search Engine Optimisation Company provides a service where that Search Engine Placement can be improved. By examining the customer website and suggesting improvements to that site, the Search Engine Placement can be enhanced. Additional support by the Search Engine Optimisation Company will also help, with the ultimate aim of being found on the first page of the search results and staying there.

Many searching customers will only look at websites found on the first page of results from a search engine and if the feedback from the search is informative. Search engine optimization can do both and for a reasonable price. After the initial analysis and tuning of a site by a Search Engine Optimisation Company the advertising company may only need to make small additional payments arising from the performance of the optimization, and this should be very cost effective.

A company could pay a search engine directly to highlight its website. This technique is known as a sponsored link, and incurs a payment for each click on the link. However, as with banner adverts, sponsored links are often deliberately overlooked. It is not uncommon for a searcher to only refer to the results of the search that he has explicitly requested, even though a sponsored link could be what he is In addition, paying one search engine for sponsored links could be ineffective, as proper optimization of a website will gain dividends across many search engines.

When done properly by a good SEO Company, optimization may be the only Online Marketing that a company will need to perform.

So search engine optimization is the marketing of your site through search engines, this is attained through a number of techniques, which a SEO Company can assist you with, are detailed below:

On-Page Optimization
This is your content or copy, if you write great content then you will have large success with Search Engine Placement. The trick is to include your particular keywords that Internet users will put into search engines to discover your product or service. It is not a matter of throwing as many keywords in as possible, if you are particular about your keywords and don’t flood your content with them, search engines will find the keywords and rank your site accordingly. Page titles, known as ‘H1’ and ‘H2 tags, are also a prominent tool to utilise specific keywords so include keywords to the titles of each paragraph. There are a number of other on-page tools but the above are the main points to attract search engines.

Off-Page Optimization
This form of optimization is doing things off site to improve your sites optimisation to improve your sites search engine rankings. It is mostly generating high quality links to your site, targeting high quality. There are over 4 billion sites, so most of them are sites that have a low Search Engine Placement with the search engine and are consequently not the quality you are looking to have a link with. Quality links are sites that have a straight association to your product or service, when a user types in search engine optimization they expect to find information on search engine optimization not a site that has no relevance to search engine optimization. Google respects sites that make it easier for them to assist their users and not to take their users to something irrelevant.

Behind-Page Optimization
This is where a Search Engine Optimization Company or a web designer can assist you as this optimization is in the code of the site. What is known as Meta Tags, form the basis of the optimisation, in these tags you can insert your page title, page description, keywords and also direct the search engines as to which part of the site is searchable and not. There is other coding that can be used including ‘alt’ tags for all your images to incorporate your particular keywords and as I have mentioned ‘H1’ and ‘H2’ tags for your content titles.

These are the 3 techniques used for search engine optimization, but is it needed for your company? That depends on your personal Online Marketing plan, do you want a presence on the Internet? Will the Internet be a beneficial source of income? Some trades such as electricians, plumbers and joiners don’t have a need for these, they rely on directory listings such as the Yellow pages and Thompson local so it is the nature of your business that determines your call for search engine optimization.

The selection methodology should be more than simply based on cost, as there might be Companies who are not as honest as the competition, in that they may make extravagant claims, such as to certify to get the client to Search Engine Placement at the No.1 slot of page 1. In these times of more and more Companies moving to the Internet the challenges for top placement, especially for Companies in a big Online Marketing area, can be tight, so just getting anywhere on the first page can be seen as a success.

The Companies needs to be sure that the Search Engine Optimisation Company is honest, which could be done by asking them for a list of their clients and then contacting some of them to get their perspective. This would also give some the market and how successful they are, although in the real world there may well be a new Company that is trying to enter the SEO market and is quite honest in its approach.

One way of seeing how good a SEO company is would be to do a internet search and see what Search Engine Placement their web site has in the organic results area, i.e. the results below those that are sponsored. If it isn’t on page one then their Online Marketing skills for their services are not that good, so are they going to succeed on the client’s web site?

The length of time that a client web site has been on page 1 will indicate if the Search Engine Optimisation Company is using ethical or White Hat techniques to optimise the site pages. If the Organisation reports that they were on page 1 but now are way down the list or not showing altogether, then this means that the Search Engine Optimisation Company has been using unethical or Black Hat methods. The search engines can analyse these methods and can remove the offending web site from the search index, which means that it will not be found in search output at all.

White Hat methods can provide a long term placement near the head of the organic results and only severe competition from other Companies in the same Online Marketing area should normally affect that position, or maybe from sites that have been ‘optimised’ by using short term Black Hat methods of course.

In short the best way of finding a honest Search Engine Optimisation Company is by referral and asking people who are clients of such Companies.

This SEO Company has a team of people who work only with honest, White Hat methods and can help to get a client web site onto page 1.

Firstly we will review the pay per click method, a way of ensuring that you are visible to the people searching for your selected keywords by paying for a Search Engine Placement in the sponsored links portion of the search results page. This system has a number of positive attributes. The biggest is the speed at which results are generated. To set up a campaign like this takes less than an hour and within one week you will have some very useful information about how it is going. Visitors to your site will increase immediately and as long as you are offering what the searcher understood that you were selling from your pay per click ad your sales should follow not far behind.

Another great feature of the pay per click method is that if you do by chance get something wrong, say in the choice of your keywords, it is obvious very quickly. You can identify in a matter of days that although you are getting loads of clicks through to your website no one is buying anything. This will prompt you to reconsider your campaign before too much money has been poured down the drain. It is possible with pay per click to specify your budget and therefore plan financially knowing that you will pay no more that the maximum you yourself have opted for.

On the down side it can still work out very pricey as enquiries (clicks) go up, so too does your bill, whereas the price of other forms of advertising stays steady no matter how many customers it draws. Also there is proven statistics that shows that organic Search Engine Placement listings receive ten times the number of clicks that pay per click do, suggesting that a lot of searchers would prefer not to use them.

Now turning to Search Engine Optimization we can see a much slower route. As it is organic or natural it tends to take a matter of weeks before any improvement is made and then as the clients website gradually climbs to page 1 the sales start to increase steadily over a subsequent period. This is certainly no quick fix. Another issue with it, unlike pay per click, is that due to it’s speed, if you do get the keywords incorrect at the beginning you will have wasted a lot of effort before you actually identify the problem. This is one of the reasons why getting some professional advice from a SEO Company may well be a cost effective way forward.

On the plus side if you do have an ongoing sales organisation the effort and the wait is definitely worth it. The charges from the search engine optimization company, after an upfront fee are usually a small amount, say ?15 per week for every keyword that gains a search engine placement ranking on page 1. Bearing in mind the increased number of visitors to your site from the organic listing this works out far far cheaper than pay per click.

So overall it seems that pay per click is brilliant for immediate business and for one off sales. Whereas Search engine optimization seems to lend itself to the online marketing of steady medium to long term business.

The starting point of ethical optimization is in depth analysis and use of keywords and phrases that a searching customer is likely to use in and around a business’s website. The SEO Company must agree the keywords to be supported with the business owners, as that keyword list should become the basis of payments made by the business for its improved Search Engine Placement.

References or links to the client site, specially from other web-sites that are relevant will also enhance its profile and importance with the search engines. A website with more of these backward references will automatically seem to be more popular. The right links in the right places aid both the receiver and the giver.

These techniques are also supported by the creation of various articles referring to the client’s business. These articles are then widely distributed across the internet. The articles will contain back linkslinks that connect to the client website.

These techniques, sometimes known as White Hat techniques, usually enjoy much greater long-term success. They enhance the search from a human point of view rather than the pure mechanics of a search. They stick to the rules and policies laid out by the search engines. Optimisation using ethical means will not only enhance the client success rate but also strengthen the reputation of the client with potential customers and search engines. This also reflects well on the SEO Company and the reliability of the search engines themselves for Online Marketing.

As with any kind of business, there are many methods of achieving the desired results. Unethical techniques can be implemented aggressively for greater short term impact, but with long-term consequences. They might even result in a company’s website being actively black-listed by search engines. However, Optimizers using these techniques (known in some circles as Black Hat techniques) appear to feel that a damaged reputation is an acceptable price of that gain, not worrying about the long-term future.

One popular technique used is spamdexing, or keyword stuffing, which involves overloading a client page with keywords to make the page appear more relevant to a search robot. Such unethical use of keywords could, in the past, result in a search engine giving a falsely high priority to an inappropriate website. This overloading or Keyword Stuffing was frequently done by making keywords invisible to human visitors viewing the website. Keyword stuffing is sometimes still employedused as a way of directing searchers to a doorway page, an intermediate website typically owned by the optimizer. This site is then used to direct a searcher to the client’s site instead of allowing the searcher to go directly from the search results list to the actual site that he is looking for return immediately to the search engine results in the hope of finding a more useful outcome with another company and can result in an undeserved distrust of that search engine.