Understanding is the key to every endeavor, having a clear understanding of what is ahead and knowing the obstacles is considered to be the first step to solving the problem or achieving the goal. In the field of search engine optimisation, having a nature of being the most tedious online business, it is imperative for an SEO company and SEO consultant to learn every aspect of search engine optimisation as well as the target application that is the search engine. Previously, the different parts of a search engine in the front end were discussed, that is knowing the different parts of the search engine in order to accurately identify how data is presented by the search engine through its search engine results page. The second part in understanding the search engine is by understanding or simplifying the understanding on how search would occur or be implemented.

According to research and observations as well as explanations given by several search engine experts the process of search starts with the search engine bot or spider. A search engine bot or spides is simply a program that is developed in order to “crawl” and collect data from different websites and its role is to gather those that are most relevant to specific keywords and that it would return such data to the search engine for proper processing. According to SEO companies and SEO consultants who are experts in the field of search engine spiders there are two major roles that spiders undertake, the first one is to crawl and the second is to index.

The Crawling role of the spider is viewed as the ability of the program or algorithm (spider) to travel from page to page, website to website via the different links and it gathers relevant links and contents along the way.

The Indexing property of the spider is said to be its ability to create or build a database of phrases or keywords and relating such with the web pages or websites that contains similar or relevant information as well as relating such with other sites that links to another site.

The Uniform Resource Locator or the URL which is also known as the website’s address is another area where SEO companies and SEO consultants should devote time to when optimising the entire website. The Uniform Resource Locator is very much part of the website although it is not part of the design itself. The URL is being utilised by search engines as the conduit to crawl into the different pages of the website and for some websites using content management system one of the main issues is the fact that the URL of the different pages of the website is not search engine friendly. In order to make the web page easy to crawl for search engine bots and crawlers it is imperative that the web page address or the URL be easy to crawl, the following are some tips that could optimise your website’s URL’s.
1. Utilise words in your uniform resource locators when developing the pages of your website, use words that will be descriptive of the content of the webpage but you also have to take note not to use lengthy and unnecessary parameters. Incorporating keywords in your URL may be fine as long as you do not overdo it and that it is still descriptive of the web pages content.
2. When developing your web page and uploading your files into the web host it would be prudent to make a simple directory structure, this is to easily tell search engine crawlers and your website visitors on the location of the files that they are viewing avoid nesting the filed too deep by placing it in several subdirectories.
3. Avoid creating two versions of your Uniform Resource Locator as this will split your web pages’ reputation and for Google it would split your websites’ page ranking.
Following these three guidelines could help increase the search engine optimisation campaign for your target site yielding quality and desirable results.

One of the most important element for a website is usability, this entails the ease of navigation for the website. It is important to incorporate easy website navigation because this will increase the efficiency of user experience thus preventing the visitors of your website from navigating away from your website. Search engines also favour good navigation from the websites because as many SEO companies and SEO consultants know the links, navigations and URL’s of  the website is used by the search engine bots as the bridge to crawl the website and gather enough data for the central engine to process. If the navigation of a web page is poor due to broken links then the search engine crawlers will not be able to gather enough data about the target website which could compromise the indexing or ranking of such target website.

In order to increase or optimise the navigation of you’re website SEO companies and SEO consultants suggests the following:

1.       Plan the structure of your web pages’ navigation and place appropriate labels where specific files and pages will be found, make sure that the folder where the files will be incorporated will be properly and relevantly labelled.

2.       Increase visitor convenience by incorporating breadcrumb lists, a breadcrumb list is a row of internal links which is found either at the top or bottom of the page for purposes of quick navigation back to the previous pages that were visited by the user.

3.       Prepare two sitemaps, one for the visitor and one for the search engine. For visitor’s sitemap it is a list of the different pages that the user could visit. For the search engine sitemap it is an XLM Sitemap which is a file that could be submitted to search engines that would serve as a map for the web crawlers to follow.

Following these three guidelines have time and again proven that optimising a website’s navigation would contribute in the increase of the website’s ranking both in page ranking and in the SERP.

Whether SEO companies and SEO consultants like it or not the main target search engine for every SEO campaign would be the search engine giant, Google, which is due to the fact that Google is the foremost search engine and it is used by millions of people daily worldwide making it a search engine that is a good source of traffic for the target website. It is common knowledge among SEO companies and SEO consultants that every search engines’ algorithm is always kept a secret leaving the SEO companies and SEO consultants in the “dark” with regards to how to rank high and fast in the search engine results page of a particular search engine. This is the reason why many have resorted to researching and experimenting in order to find at least the best way to optimise their website.

Google in its effort to help many internet marketers and entrepreneurs online has released a simple basic SEO guideline that SEO companies and SEO consultants can follow in order to have a decent Google ranking. Among the tips that Google has shared in their Webmaster Central is the relevance or importance of using page titles or the title tag in the webpages. Title tags are important because of the fact that the page title is being utilised by search engines in properly displaying the search engine results page. It is because of this fact the importance of the page title is given much importance. Google has outlined three strategies that SEO consultants and SEO companies could use in dealing with the optimisation of the page title and these are:

To make the page title be a source where it will accurately describe the web page’s content, therefore, one must avoid the incorporation of unrelated description or keywords into the page title. Another one is to make each of the pages’ title unique, this is in order to help Google distinguish one site from another.

Finally the title must be concise, that is descriptive as well as brief this is in order for Google to display your website in the search engine results page ranking properly.

Most often than not there are elements in a website that is or that are being ignored when implementing as search engine optimisation campaign. This may be because of the fact that the effect of optimising such element is way less than what is gained from other SEO techniques. However, for Google and other search engines there should be no reason to divert from the basic elements of search engine optimisation. One of the elements that is constantly ignored by many SEO companies and SEO consultants is the meta description tag. This tag or element does not deliver a direct effect on to the web page or website nor does it greatly affect the search engine results page ranking of a target website. The Meta Description element however is very useful because of the fact that this tag contains the summary on what the website is all about, unlike for a title tag the meta description tag can accommodate longer descriptions of about one to two sentences. The contents of the meta tag description is that Google may utilised snippets of the description when displaying your website URL in the search engine results page.

When writing the description or when using the meta description tag since it is also a factor being considered by search engines one must exercise caution so as not to be flagged as a spam website. The following are some guidelines that SEO companies and SEO consultants use when writing the content of the meta description element.

First write a meta description content that will accurately summarise the web pages’ content. This means that an SEO company should avoid writing irrelevant and unrelated description, avoid generic descriptions, avoid using only the keywords as the meta tag content, avoid copying the and placing the entire content of the web page and placing it on your own. Finally you should write unique descriptions for every page in order to accurately describe the contents of a specific webpage.

Search engine optimisation is always said to be a very tedious process because of the fact that there are a lot of processes and strategies involved in order to attain a single goal. It is like making every part in your system work efficiently to make the whole machine to work, SEO is made up of different processes that should be performed or implement properly in order to realise positive outcome. With the numerous types of processes or techniques and strategies involved in search engine optimisation, not to mention the huge number of competition many SEO companies and SEO consultants sometimes would get discouraged and thus forcing them to resort into black hat techniques in order to get results fast but risking the target website to possibilities of suspension or ban from the different search engines when such black hat techniques are discovered. One very important element when tackling an SEO campaign is without resorting to black hat techniques is to organise your SEO campaign properly.

Organising your SEO campaign can start by outlining the general processes or strategies that you will be implementing in your SEO campaign this is in order to give SEO companies and SEO consultants like you a definite direction which you could of course modify depending on the circumstances like algorithm changes among other factors. The following are the basic steps or processes that are done in implementing an SEO campaign:

1.       Keyword Research – this step is considered a cornerstone of an SEO campaign as this would determine one of your end goal and that is what search term would you like to have a good rank at.

2.       Organise the search terms and build your website pages revolving around the research related search terms.

3.       Integrate Relevant and Fresh Content as much as possible dedicate a page in your website where you can continuously update the content.

4.       Build links – This involves validating internal and external links as well as building inbound links from related websites.

5.       SEO Maintenance – This involves the interpretation of SEO analytics data and doing something about it especially if the analytics shows that parts of your website are decreasing in traffic or keyword authority.

Search engine optimisation entails a lot of strategies which are generally categorised in to two, links and content. Links and Content are the main factors that helps increase both traffic and reputation of a website. Traffic and Reputation are the two main purpose why an SEO campaign is being implemented and this is to achieve the ultimate goal of gaining conversions and revenue. One of the strategy that may combine content and link building into one is the integration or use of blogs for this purpose. Many companies online have made or spent a considerable amount of money in order to increase their traffic and conversions but to no avail because of the fact that they have not focused their efforts on increasing both links and content. As what was stated above the links and content can be generated for the target website through the use of blogs or blog sites. This is why one of the main considerations for a website entering into this type of strategy is to incorporate a blog page or a blog within the target website, this way the blog could serve as the overall sites’ fresh source of content.

In order to maintain the blog and to increase link efficiency as well as content for such blog it is important that the blog site be provided with daily blog posts, expect an increase in links when you post engaging and as much as possible daily blog posts. Links can be acquired through relentless posts because of the fact that there are blog search engines that would crawl and index your blogs or blog posts.

Once you have incorporated blog and blog posts into your site make sure that you regularly ping your posts. The purpose of which is to broadcast that your blog site has new blog posts.

With this strategy expect that you will gain a good amount of backlinks and indexed pages as brought about by the blog contents or posts.

For many search engines the two main factor or characteristics that a website should have are backlinks and content. One this article we will focus on the first characteristics and that is backlinks. Backlinks are defined as those links that would come from outside web pages or websites other than yours. Backlink building is considered to be a very important part of search engine optimisation because of the fact that it is the criteria being utilised by many search engines in terms of establishing the reputation of the website. Sometimes known as inbound links, a website linking to your website is considered as a vote to your website. Building backlinks however is not an easy task, because of the fact that every link must have met certain criteria before being fully considered as a contributory link to the website.

First thing that should be considered is the quality of the link, more than quantity, quality could contribute more to the establishing of your websites reputation. Quality links are determined by the reputation and relevance of the website that is linking to the target website, SEO companies and SEO consultants would focus mainly on the websites’ page rank and the relevance of the content to the content of the target website. Few websites with a high page  rank and with related content that would link to your website would give more chances of your website gaining reputation and page rank rather that thousands of websites with unrelated content and no page rank linking to your website.

Second is to distribute your gained page rank and reputation all over your websites’ pages. Sharing the page rank gained with other pages would not necessarily diminish your sites’ reputation but rather it would circulate the page ranking around your webpages. Thus it is important to practice crosslinking within your website’s pages.

Third, when you already have built your site and content SEO companies and SEO consultants encourage the submission of the website URL to reputable search engines and directories the most popular directory being DMOZ.

Search engine optimisation is a very complex process and a tedious one at that, this is brought about by the fact that there is a lot of strategies and techniques involved in the implementation of a single SEO campaign without any guarantee of achieving the desired results. It must always be remembered that there is no single solution or SEO strategy for every website that needs to be optimised and sometimes the effect of such SEO strategy may take a while or sometimes such SEO strategy may not have any effect at all. This sometimes force many SEO companies and SEO consultants to experimenting on other strategies which sometimes may result to the strategy being considered as a spam technique which would later on cause the search engine to ban the target website. Gaining traffic through search engines is very important that is why as much as possible an SEO company and SEO consultant should avoid getting banned or suspended by the search engine, although the strategies and techniques that are used in search engine optimisation are varying one can follow standard strategies which up to today proves to be effective in search engine optimisation.

The following are some of the basic guidelines that are considered to be basic and standard which are effective in the optimisation of a website.

First is to utilise links in your website appropriately, that is means that your links must be properly in place and that are used primarily to facilitate navigation of your website. When gathering incoming links or inbound links as well as outbound links it is important to take into consideration relevance, meaning your site should only link to or from relevant websites.

Second is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Content is used to inform visitors about the website or the particular web page, further content also is used to inform the search engine crawlers on the keywords of the website so therefore it is imperative to keep the content fresh and updated on a regular basis.

With these two guidelines the basic of search engine optimisation is already outlined highlighting the most important elements in search engine optimisation that is link building and content creation.

It has been said time and again that search engine optimisation is a very tedious and daunting task this is because of the fact that a single SEO campaign involves several tasks and every SEO campaign is not a guarantee of gaining the desired number of traffic going into your target website. Further, an SEO campaign is virtually unending because of the fact that the competition in the field of search engine optimisation is very stringent that a number one ranking today may change to a lower ranking on the following day a change which can be attributed with the fact that a competitor website might have increased its SEO efforts or there might have been a change in the search engine algorithm. These factors are what makes the process of search engine optimisation a very tedious task. In order for some SEO companies and SEO consultants to lighten the burden in the implementation phase of the SEO campaign some of them are resorting to automation, that is using applications to automatically perform SEO strategies that are normally done manually. One example of this is submission of websites to the different directories, social bookmarks among others.

Although automation can drastically reduce the amount of time for the accomplishment of an SEO strategy many SEO companies and SEO consultants would prefer not to resort to automation this is because of the following reasons:

1.       Automation can curtail creativity, one must remember that the field of search engine optimisation requires an SEO company or SEO consultant to be creative because of the fact that SEO strategies have already become common and in order for one to get ahead of the pack, so to speak, development of a new strategy as a product of the SEO consultants’ creativity is important.

2.       Many Search engines have now incorporated in their search engine algorithm a way of considering automated submissions as unnatural way of link building which means that such automation would make the search engine consider the target website as a spam website.

Automation may help SEO companies and SEO consultants in lightening the burden of the search engine optimisation strategies and although there may be negative effects on the use of automation, it could still prove to be useful in cutting down time in implementing the strategy however caution and moderation should be exercised.