Search Engine Optimisation Forums

Search Engine Optimisation is the Wild West of web design. Once up on a time web design itself was the Wild West, a time when anything goes and what was right and wrong was not clearly understood.

These days most clients have a reasonable idea of what they want in a website (that is that have a general idea of what the website should do for their business), but few people in the real world know what SEO is and why they would want it. Most businesses understand the benefit of good Google results, but most don't have any idea how google works.

Because of this there are a whole lot of Snake Oil Salesmen out there trading of the ignorance and naivety of large and small businesses. People who traditionally trusted advertising sources like The Yellow Pages, newspaper, radio and TV advertising which no longer gives the returns it once did, are desperate for an advertising angle that works. This desperation makes them easy prey for Internet Marketers who phone up and, by mentioning the word Google in their spiel, appear to be from Google and offering them the number one spot in the search results.

Fast forward 6 months and the business owner has forwarded a number of thousands of dollars to this previously unknown Internet Marketing company and seen very little if any return. The Internet Marketing company has either gone into hiding or suggests upping the ante (i.e. sending them larger cheques) in order to achieve the results they promised in the first place.

With this scenario many businesses go looking for information on the Internet themselves as to how to improve their chances of being found online. Enter the SEO forums. Full of sharks and those same Snake Oil Salesmen promising the works and insider secrets for a (proportionally) very small amount of money. Their offer is to good to be true, they are sharing it because they want to give back, they've made so much money anyway it doesn't really mater to them anymore. The techniques are simple and will take very little time yet set you up for a life of luxury for ever.

Why does this sound too good to be true, because, of course, it is.

If you're doing any Search engine optimisation, Search Engine Marketing or Internet Marketing (there's a subtle different to all of these) you should ring a few local SEO businesses in your area, find someone you can trust, negotiate a fee that makes sense for you and is enough that that company will want to do your work and get started. Most SEO strategies take time and regular work, there really are very few shortcuts. Get going because the Yellow Pages and other traditional means of advertising are only going to get less viable.

Twitter

We've decided that Twitter might be useful after all, it certainly gives an easy way to post links to new websites.

Although a lot of tweets are simply daily static and mindless chatter that's impossible to understand unless you know the people involved and rewind all the tweets in a particular conversation, it has it's uses.

A quick way of letting the Internet, read Google, that a new website has been launched is always useful. An inbound link from an established website may also be a good thing, we'll see.