Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is the whole shebang of online activity intended to get your product in front of eyeballs and make sure it sells.
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation has certainly attracted its fair share of criticism over the years, and while there are always some bad apples in any profession, there is certainly no truth to the suggestion that it is a con, a black art (we put paid to that little myth on this very site), or the province of smoke-and-mirrors conmen. As we have shown on our homepage, Google itself has stated that SEO can provide a useful service for site owners. So who are you going to believe? Google, or the other guy?
Why SEO works
Search engine optimisation exists, works, and is very useful indeed because of the following simple state of affairs:
To fill up their search databases, search engines send little automated programs called spiders (because they move along the web) to visit websites, and wherever possible they look through the whole of your site. They report back to the Google database, for example, with your site details, and Google then tallies up over hundred different aspects of your site, as gathered by the spider - title bars, internal links, words on the page, the way files and pages are named, the way images are named, the way people link to your site and so on. As we said, over one hundred aspects such as these are looked at, weighed and sifted and from this, how well you match a query for a particular word or phrase is determined by the Google algorithm.
It is the job of a search engine optimiser (who is also known as an SEO) to ensure that a website fits the bill for a particular search word or phrase, that the things a search engine looks for in your site are the things it does, in fact, find.
Summary - Search engine optimisation
That, in a nutshell, is search engine optimisation. You can find more about the specifics of what Google is looking for on other pages in this site. In fact, with the information on this site, anyone will be able to perform some very useful aspects of SEO for their own site, simply with access to the Internet and no special tools whatsoever. For free.
Does that sound like smoke and mirrors to you?