Why SEO work and specifically Indexing requires a complex blend of skills

If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Getting a company’s name and products, or services, onto the first page of a genuine search isn’t a trivial piece of work. In fact, there are four distinct skills that a search engine optimizer needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all four. In truth, to get all four, people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills. Now, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do this? Best use of your time?

Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work are:

Many website designers produce more and ever more eye-catching designs with animations and clever rollover buttons hoping to entice the people onto their sites. That is the first big mistake; using designs like these will actually decrease your chances of a high rating. Yes, that’s right; all that money you have paid for the website design could be wasted since no-one will ever find your site.

The reason for that is because before you get people to your site you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to trawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed those sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by spiderbots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful search.

I am dazed and amazed how many times I look at websites and immediately know they are just waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, now I have stopped playing the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem. So, optimizing a website to be friendly is often a compromise between a visually very attractive site and one that is easy to find site.

The second skill is that of optimizing the actual HTML code to be spiderbot friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like FrontPage, which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to develop, and just when you think that you have cracked it, the search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the search results.

That is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur. Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and checks kept on what the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first results page in .

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. That is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. Spiderbots like Inktomi, love text but only when written well in proper English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks, also they may actively penalise your site – that is sandboxing. takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months, you can still be found but not until results page 14 – really useful! In addition to good English, the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.

The final skill is marketing, after all that is what we are doing – marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the World Wide Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found if you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to sell and knowledge of what actual searches may provide dividends.

I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimization companies need more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.