I have been asked a number of times why we give away so much information and advice on Search engine optimisation on this blog and at our monthly seminars we have been accused of giving away the SEO secrets, but I feel this is a very short sighted view.

The more you make people think that Search Engine Optimisation is a secret and mysterious art the more you will build distrust and the more people will shy away from using it, and this is the oboist of what we as a business want and it is not going to be good for your business if you are not utilising the best SEO practices.

We offer seminars free of charge that explain in great detail how SEO can be used to get your site found in the search engines, we also have books on SEO and on-line marketing that we are happy to give you again at no charge there is the blog that will give you answers to lots of internet marketing questions and then of course there is the option to have us look over your site and produce the free of charge SEO report.

All this is designed to make sure that more people in business know about SEO and that they mystery of SEO and on-line marketing is removed and when the smoke and mirrors is removed you will see that what you are left with is a professional and dedicated SEO team that are here to promote your business in the search engines.

When thinking about your linking strategy there are some things you need to consider, are your links properly formatted? are you pointing them to the best pages of your site? are you buying links and is it going to be obvious to Google that is what you are doing?

If for example you were running a cottage holidays website in the South of England, a place where people could come and choose a cottage to stay in for a week or two, how do you avoid being spotted for buying links, some of the give always are that the text on the page has nothing to do with holidays, cottages or the locations that you serve.

The techniques used in linking from high PR pages to other sites worked 2 or 3 years ago and are still of some value but may harm you if one of your competitors tells Google that you are buying links and Google investigates then they could all be discounted, and this is a waste of money.

So what you want in a link? The link needs to come from a page with relevant text, Page Rank is much less important than relevance of the text that is on the page, also the links to your site need to be spread across the site, so that internal pages also have links to them. You need to avoid site wide links as they can appear unnatural, a variety of link text should also be used when linking to the site, so the link text for search engine optimisation Salisbury goes directly to a page about search engine optimisation in Salisbury.

It should be the goal of the site to rank well for 2 – 3 terms per page of the site, the home page should also not rank for more than 2 – 3 terms, otherwise the page begins to look and feel unfocused.

I would also suggest that you undertake some detailed keyword research into various terms that could bring you in more traffic, there are always terms that have been overlooked by your competition, just think, if you rank well for 50 phrases that bring in 500 visitors each a month that is much better than ranking for 2 phrases that bring in 10,000 visitors a month, and the competition is likely to be much less.

The SEO should be an ongoing and ever changing process so that it encompasses the changes in the search engines algorithms but also the changing needs of the company as you grow different keywords will become more relevant and the SEO needs to be flexible enough to incorporate these changes.

Social networking and social book marking sites allow people with similar interests to get together in groups and discuss the subjects and products they are interested in.

This can be of use if you are marketing your products and services on-line as you can also join these groups.

You can find out what people are talking about and what they are looking for when it comes to your products. This will help you with your keyword research and with producing tools or information to attract new visitors to your site.

When using these sites, you must be careful not to appear ‘spammy’ and just out to promote your site.

You should offer help and advice to members of the group and become recognised as the expert in your field. This will result in not only more visitors but also visitors who trust you and are ready to buy from you.