Raw 02 - September 2008 - (Page 29)

The History of Search Engine Optimisation what are we going to do for Million Impossible and what could we do for any company wanting to increase the visitors to their websites. Search Engine Optimisation or Search Engine Marketing is the process of improving your websites position within the organic listings on the left hand side of a “Google” type search results page. Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right, looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. Webmasters and content providers began optimising sites for search engines within the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. In 1998 Google was born and attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. New search engines were soon to follow each with their own unique way of “grading” the ever increasing numbers of websites being launched. New factors, in determining page position, were beginning to emerge including on-page content and hyperlink analyses and off-page linking. Automated search engine algorithms (spiders) began to regularly visit websites and “Page Ranking” was born. In theory the cream would always float to the top, so those sites that were perceived to be good would migrate organically to the top pages while those sites which were poor in quality would languish in the lower pages. Ok, enough of the history lesson back to business, what are we going to do for Million Impossible and what could we do for any company wanting to increase the visitors to their websites. Over the next few months, with the kind permission of Bradley, I intend to detail the work that we will be performing on the Million Impossible website and hopefully show how good optimisation can increase the number of unique visitors. As a rider to this work, it is first important to state that there are many factors that determine the success of any campaign: • Age of the website – brand new sites take time for the content to be properly indexed by the search engines. • Market Sector Competition – It is easier to promote a company selling chocolate teapots than one offering insurance services. • Unique Content – what makes your site better than the others selling a similar commodity. • Global link popularity of site • Total relevance of inbound links The list is exhausting but in essence a SEO company’s job is to implement a series of strategies that will in time hopefully enable your web site to out perform that of your competitors. Page 1 can not be guaranteed, my first piece of free advice is to steer well clear of SEO companies who state otherwise!! So the Million Impossible Campaign begins, in the next few weeks the Blackwood Productions team will implement a series of recommendations that we believe are essential to improve the MI website. This is not going to be an easy job, Million Impossible PLC just happens to be in a industry sector that has some of the most competitive keywords/search phrases on the internet today. To use my earlier analogy if MI wanted to promote the search phrase “chocolate teapots” Google returns search result of approximately 400,000 while “networking” produces 275million results. Thanks Brad for the Challenge! For more information on how Blackwood Productions can help your company with Search Engine Marketing please do not hesitate to contact me cwright@bwpuk.co.uk or visit our website www. blackwoodproductions. co.uk. Chris Wright (SEO Guru - Blah!) “ “ “ BLACKWOOD PRODUCTIONS RAW millionimpossible.com 29 http://www.blackwoodproductions.co.uk http://www.blackwoodproductions.co.uk http://www.blackwoodproductions.co.uk http://www.millionimpossible.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Raw 02 - September 2008

Raw 02 - September 2008 Contents Scott English Rachael Elnaugh Colin Stroud Heidi Weir Chris Wright Million Impossible Emma Thompson

Raw 02 - September 2008

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