By Peter R Smithson

 My interest in how search engines pick websites and to present them on the internet began in 1999, 12 months after Google was born but before anyone knew about it.


I was working for Ericsson as the general manager of Sony Videoconferencing. I knew the internet was bound to become highly popular and needed to be easier to use. I spend $25,000 of the companies' money building a beautiful looking website called virtual-travel. It was just super. It had pretty good information about the products we had available, but not enough general information. After I completed building the site I was not sure how people were going to find their way to it. After we publicized the launch with some email marketing we had a few visitors for just a few days, but then it dropped off to nothing. I knew what a search engine was, and knew who Google was; we thought it was just another one we were starting to use a little more.

People back then were still not often going to search engines to find stuff they needed; alongside us humans being creatures of habit, we just thought it was hard to use. In hindsight, websites back then not so great, and not so informative either. It was just easier to use the yellow pages or newspaper and call the business that was spending on the largest or best advertisement on the day.

There wasn't a search engine popular or powerful enough to govern how websites should be; and reward them by showing them at the top of the search results. So the trouble lay at both ends...the users thought it was hard to get what they wanted, because it was actually very hard!

I remember wondering how to get these search engine's to know about my new website and rank it at the top of their page. I called the business we had spent all the money with, and they didn't know....or wouldn't tell me. So I found out who were the biggest website design-houses in the city and I asked them. Two more of these companies couldn't, or wouldn't tell me. Until one smart chap eventually said to me "yes I know, with Meta Tags"....I remember saying "ahhhhh...Meta Tags..... I love it!" He was right at the time....that and a keyword stuffed URL and Meta info, was about all there was to search algorithms. My fascination began.

What has changed for the consumer through the success of the internet....it is that it is no longer the company with a big print advertising budget that gets all the phone calls. The Google search algorithm strives to deliver the company that has done the 'hard road'.....the organization that has been around the longest, provides the most organized information, and the one that links to, and from alternate information sources. Search delivers the business who have been developing and organizing their content to deliver relative original information.... the one who is an authority in that industry or topic.

So what do internet marketers do? We replicate the natural process a website would normally take years, and do it within just a few months....or in a year or so. To really understand how internet-search marketing works, you first need to understand how it is naturally intended to work.

Of course Google is well aware of internet marketers, and knows Search Engine Optimizers (known as SEO's) are not going to go away....so they have to accommodate us and we have to repect them. It is important when doing SEO to remember to keep the process looking natural. This is known as 'White Hat SEO' and is deliberately obliging Google. Also there is 'Black Hat' SEO; those that set out to try and fool Google, and quite frankly they will always eventually fail. Google only employs geniuses to develop the algorithm; and they have plenty of them, all over the world. They are all continually re-writing and contributing to this algorithm; now probably the world's greatest and longest equation. It is updated about 10 times a week. So it is a waste of time to try to outsmart Google.

So it comes down to the question - What can an SEO do, to help my website look mature, informative, organized, and present as an authority in my industry in order to rank on Google front page?

See Optimax for advice on SEO Internet Marketing and search engine marketing or tips on how to improve your website traffic.

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