Search Engine Optimisation Possibilities
Search engine optimisation is concerned with getting your website noticed and indexed by the search engines to the maximum extent possible.
What it cannot do is to guarantee that your website will always appear in a particular position in the rankings. The only way to get close to achieving this is through pay–per–click advertising.
What Is Possible
Long–Term Results
New websites always start at the bottom of the list then work their way up over time. One of the factors taken into account by search engines is the number of visitors a website receives. If your website is informative and properly constructed and optimised, it will attract visitors and rise in the rankings.
Specific Searches
Everything depends on the terms people use. A search for electrician will produce several million results (go on — try it). A search for self–employed IEEE–certified electrician in Swindon will produce far fewer results. If you happen to be a self–employed IEEE–certified electrician in Swindon, your website will be competing with a limited number of others, and this is when Lab 99 Web Design’s SEO techniques become effective.
Of course, your website is pretty much guaranteed to show up first in the listings if someone searches using the name of your company or organisation. But most search engine optimisation is concerned with more general search terms than that.
High Rankings
By choosing the right form of words for the website’s content it is certainly possible to secure a place high in the rankings for particular search terms. Exactly how high will depend on factors out of the optimiser’s control. Because a website’s ranking is affected by factors such as changes to competing websites and changes to the search engines’ algorithms, the ranking will vary unpredictably from time to time.
Knowledge and Hard Work
The only way to get ahead of the pack is by the skilled use of established search engine optimisation techniques.
What Isn’t Possible
Instant Results
Submitting a website to a search engine will make the search engine aware of the site, but won’t guarantee that the site will be visited and evaluated. Although most websites will be visited within a few days of their submission to a search engine, the evaluation process is unpredictable and entirely out of the hands of the website’s owner and designer. Most websites will start to appear in the search engine listings within two to four weeks of their submission, but only the smallest sites will be fully indexed straight away. A large website may take several months to be fully explored by all the search engines.
General Searches
The more general the search term, the more web pages will match it. If your website is just one of thousands competing in the same search space, even the best search engine optimisation techniques will have little practical effect. It doesn’t really matter whether your site rises from page 100 to page 10, because almost no–one looks as far as page 10. General searches are dominated by large, established websites.
Guaranteed First Place
It is simply not possible to guarantee top position in the rankings for any website, even one dealing with a very specific topic. It used to be possible, by using a variety of dodgy techniques such as repeating keywords hundreds of times on each page, but the search engines soon became wise to this. They now blacklist websites that use underhand methods. Sorry, but anyone who claims to guarantee top place in the rankings is a crook.
Magic Wand
There is no magic formula that will enable your website to jump ahead of your competitors. If there were, they would use it to jump ahead of you!