Search Engine Optimization (aka. SEO)

Effective search engine optimization is like alchemy .. part science, part art and part black magic and altogether misunderstood by the masses!

In a nutshell, SEO is the single most powerful form of advertising available today – because it intercepts potential customers at the crucial decision making point of the buying process when they are doing pre-purchase research.  Somebody doing a search on one of the search engines for a term such as “send cheap flowers online” is practically sitting there, credit card in hand, ready to spend money on sending flowers and if YOUR site appears first, you will in all probability get the sale ahead of all your competitors.

Search engine optimization is however a poorly chosen term for the practice. We cannot “optimize” search engines. We do not have access to the search engines but we can however optimize websites and web pages for the search engines. That is to say we can present the content of a website to the search engines in such a way that they will consider our sites to be the most useful and relevant site for a particular search term, and will therefore reward us with a high ranking position the the engine. (SERPs = Search Engine Results Positions)

As a full time internet marketer making my entire living online for the past 14 odd years (about 17 centuries in internet years , I have been actively involved in SEO and reverse engineering the search engine’s algorithms since I first started (before Google even existed!). Primarily I was only interested in making sure that my own sites got the #1 rankings but over time more and more people became aware of what I was doing and started asking me to work on their sites and get them to the top of the SERPs for their chosen keyword terms.

Anyway – long story short… since it is such an unknown practice and there are so few people that really know how to do effective search engine optimization (link wheels and meta tags are NOT what it takes in today’s hyper competitive world!) my knowledge became highly sought after.  I am currently working as head of SEO for Altech Technology Concepts. An internet centric company providing services such as connectivity, IT support and application development as well as corporate level web design and development.

SEO is NOT a one shot deal. It is not something you do as a once off while you are creating a website. It is a continuous, ongoing job that is in a constant state of flux due to the search engines ever changing algorithms.  As a result…

Cheap SEO is not Good
Good SEO is not Cheap

This means that many smaller websites cannot afford the services of a professional SEO company and there is just so much outdated, misquoted and just plain wrong information available in most of the forums that it become almost impossible to find the real info when taking a DIY approach to SEO.

Anyway – that’s what this site is for. Over time I will post all the information I know about search engine optimization (as well as a bunch of other stuff) here. If you don’t have the money to hire professional SEO services you will have to invest the time to implement it yourself.

At least I can save you some of the pain of learning from a million diverse sources and help you avoid most of the dangerous junk in most of the forums.

Happy SEOing and see you at the top.

Jim