Search Engine Optimization continues to move at an amazing rate, each search engine will continually adjust its’ algorithm in order to give its’ searchers the best results that it can.
As SEOs continue to do what they do i.e. tweak websites to put them in front of the traffic thetas looking for them, there are two main viewpoints that arise. Firstly that they unfairly tampering with the results, and secondly that they are fairly tampering with the results in a necessary way.
The truth of the matter is this; without SEO’s to amend websites so that the SEs (Search Engines) know how to rank them, the quality of the listings would be far worse. We are a necessity for the SE’s as we ensure that the cream rises to the top. 98% of web designers do not know how to get a website to rank within a search engine, they miss out on all of the key indicators within a site and so some well built, beautiful, expensive websites are destined to live in Pay Per Click land or in obscurity.
We have no-end of clients that have been sold beautiful and expensive sites and told it will solve all their problems, when in fact it doesn’t really do anything of the sort because no one can find it. We are constantly speaking to clients who wish that they hadn’t spent so much on the design of their website so that they could spend the money on optimisation.
Common sense will tell you that there’s no point in having a website that no one can find. Even in these harsh economic times as turnover is dwindling and profits are all but gone, the forward thinking website owners will look to increase their market share by either starting an SEO campaign or adding new keywords to their current campaign. There are still buyers out there to be had, but they are simply shopping more cautiously and in fewer numbers, but what you as a site owner, you need to ask yourself is, are you going to be proactive and move forward to take your share of the market, or will you hang back and end up as another failure statistic?
The traditional forms of trade are suffering from the online revolution while online sales rose dramatically in just one year. From Christmas 2007 to Christmas 2008, online sales rose by 25% and the companies that are benefiting from this are those that move with the new technology and evolve to the needs of its users.
I think it is unfortunate, but the Internet will kill the British high street, and in the fullness of time, the retail park too. More and more, bricks and clicks retailers are seeing theirs shops used as fitting rooms for an online purchase at a later date. To a certain extent, we as people are shooting ourselves in the foot somewhat as once the shops are gone we will have to manage with just the virtual world to shop in…….. which isn’t the same experience at all.
SEO will be driven by retailers needing to save money and increase footfall to both their bricks and clicks shops. It will be an interesting year in which I think we will see some more household names join, Woolworths, MFI, etc on the scrapheap. The big question is……. will you do enough to protect your market share in 2009?
Tags: advertising, business, computers, Ecommerce, internet, internet marketing, marketing, promotion, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, search engines, seo, Shopping, site promotion