which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to

develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, search engine companies

change algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in

search results.

This is no place for even most enthusiastic amateur. Results need to be

constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check 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 first results page in Google.

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is

writing of actual text that people coming to your site will read. The

Googlebot and other 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,

they may actively penalise your site – in Google terms, this is sandboxing.

Google 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! As

well as good English, spiderbots are also reading HTML code, so copy

writer also needs an appreciation of interplay between 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 this is what we are doing – marketing you

site and hence company and products/services on Web. The key here is to set

the site up to be accessible to searches that will provide most business to

you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in 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 marketing

skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to

sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.

I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimisation companies need

more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you

choose for SEO work can cover all bases.