Top ten ranking on Google using search engine optimisation by professional search engine optimisers.
If it was that easy to optimise a website to gain high rankings on Google, the top ten websites would be changing places every ten minutes. Search engine optimisation for competitive key phrases is a task best left to professionals.
Glynis Eaton continues her interview with the three leading exponents in search engine optimisation and website design. Click here to go to the start of this interview.
Q. Does website design have any influence on search engine optimisation?
David. The design itself doesn't but one thing I have learned is that some websites are not easily optimised. Clients often come to us with poorly designed websites and in circumstances like that, Paul normally advises us to discard the website and start again from scratch. Getting the balance between design and performance is not easy because you have to be able to focus on both elements without losing sight of either.
Q. Are there any genuine other search engine optimisation companies?
Leo. I could call myself a brain surgeon but it wouldn't make me one and I would not be allowed to practise. Both David and I know more about search engine optimisation than most people calling themselves search engine optimisers, but we wouldn't contemplate saying we were experts in the field of SEO. There is no law from stopping people from calling themselves search engine optimisers or working as one, but very few of them can really do the job properly. Occasionally, Paul will point out a website that has been well optimised and is usually able to say which company has done the optimisation and the mistakes they have made.
Q. So you don't need any qualifications to be a search engine optimiser?
David. No, and if you take Paul as an example, you don't need an IT background either and maybe that is the advantage he has over everyone else. If you talk to Paul about CSS, XHTML, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript or any other technical jargon you can actually see his eyes glaze over. All his optimisation techniques have nothing to do with IT systems although he will often come to Leo or me with an idea and ask us to turn it into a programme or unique web concept. Although we may have developed the programmes for Spartacus pages, Omni-Links, mercurial content and a host of other unique systems that we use, the original ideas all came from Paul. That is why we are all able to work together, because Paul would be the first to admit that he cannot do what we do.
Q. What other skills does Paul have that help him to be able to optimise websites?
Leo. Never play Poker with him. If you shuffled, then dealt out six packs of cards face up he would be able to tell you the last ten cards that you had left in your hand. He also has an uncanny ability to remember the URL addresses of thousands of pages on hundreds of websites. So if I ask him where I can find information about something, he will invariably give me not just the website, but the actual page it is on. That is why I say he has a mind like a computer and why he can look at a website and within minutes of just scouring the pages, be able to say where the mistakes are and why it doesn't perform. You cannot write a programme like that no matter how good a developer you are.
Q. So if you don't use any technical skills what do you do to optimise a website?
Paul. Just because we work on the Internet and everybody is anal about all the technical stuff doesn't mean that a website is anything more than a report on a subject that you are displaying to the world. You want people to read it, you want people to find it easy to find a particular point within the report with ease and be able to open it at any page and find their way to the beginning or section of particular interest. Most websites aren't built like that despite the fact that the majority of them all follow the same format. The search engines like anyone, want to be able to read a report if not in order, at least in a cohesive manner, it seems simple enough to me.
Q. How did you become a search engine optimiser?
Paul. I've been working on the Internet since 1996 and as the Internet expanded and our areas of business became more competitive, I was putting pressure on our designers to ensure our websites were being found. Eventually, we started employing optimisation companies who turned out to be totally useless despite all their empty promises.
Leo. I think I should explain - he was throwing his toys out of his pram one day, because our websites were slipping down the search engines and nobody in the company knew the solutions. Then one of our designers suggested that, instead of having a go at everyone he should look at the problem and tell them the solutions. It took Paul a week to start coming up with suggestions and within months, we were using optimisation techniques that Paul suggested and now optimisation is an important part of the business.
Q. So did you go away and read up on the subject?
Paul. No. Our designers and other optimisation companies we had used all talked the same language and were using techniques that were recommended on forums and other websites and at the levels we needed to perform, this just wasn't good enough. If everybody were to use the same techniques, it stands to reason that nothing was going to improve. We needed to look at ways that were different, better and capable of beating our competitors to death. It didn't take me long to work out that most of the published information on the Internet about search engine optimisation is total bollocks. I swear if I went on a forum and said you could get high Google rankings by using variable, apex-quality, RSS feeds, before you knew it there would be newsletters winging their way round the Internet and optimisers would be coming up with explanations about what it was and how to use. It's total rubbish like the idea of the Google sandbox; someone was having a laugh.
Q. So there is no Google sandbox?
Leo. Paul thinks there may be a Google sandwich stuck down the back of a filing cabinet but we have never experienced a situation where Google took months to index a website. But then we don't submit our websites to the search engines so we couldn't be certain of that. We normally expect to gain top ten positions on Google within ten to fourteen days tops.
Q. So how do you get the search engines to index a website so quickly if you don't submit it to any search engines?
David. We just put any new website we design onto Omni-Links which links hundreds of websites into the new website from day one and displays them on hundreds of Spartacus pages. Normally, within days, most of the major search engines have spidered the site through one of the links and indexed the new site. This also helps enormously with getting a website highly ranked on Google.
To continue this interview about search engine optimisation click here