Well, the answer is not as straight forward as you’d probably hoped! The search engines use a number of factors to determine which site should be listed at the top. These include (but are not limited to): the number of sites that link to you, how big or relevant are those sites, the amount of relevant content on your page and number of times the search term appears, your page titles, your meta tags, your link titles, the size of the site, the age of the domain, the time it was last updated, is your content original or copied, do you have a site map, can your dynamic content be spidered, are there broken links, pages in construction, to mention but a few.

The search engines actually don’t want us to worry too much about optimizing the page for their benefit, they just want us to offer interesting and relevant content and they decide on this basis who should go to the top. That said most search engines do issue a set of brief guidelines that they want sites to follow and simply by “playing by the rules” and creating a well organized, professional site you can be surprised at how much traffic a natural search engine ranking can produce. JNZ always follow these “best practise” guidelines and will work with you to navigate through the basics of making sure your site is highly visible to the search engines.

But you want more traffic?

Of course. Generally more traffic is more business. We can help there too! Search Engine Optimization is a long haul process but we find that a multi level attack often yields the greatest return on investment. Natural search engine rankings take time and we advocate the use of ‘pay per click’ marketing alongside producing fresh relevant content and submitting this to natural leaders in the industry. The process is involved but we can work with you to get you the results that you need.

We avoid “Black Hat” marketing as we feel that the possible short term gains could well be outweighed by the very serious risk of being thrown off the search engines completely. (This isn’t unheard of - BMW were thrown off Google for a time!). What’s “Black Hat SEO”? Well lets say that the search engines are really interested in the number of times your search term appears in the page. One “Black Hat” technique would be to copy and paste the search term hundreds of times into a page but then make sure that the text is the same colour as the background. A visitor would never see it but the search engines would.