Improving a page’s position in the search results of a search engine ensures more traffic for that page. Making their websites rank higher for appropriate searches then, is beneficial for webmasters. Now a popular marketing technique in the UK, the act of doing this falls under the name Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
SEO obviously grew with the rise of search engines, and the popularity of certain search engines has shaped the market for SEO. Steadily growing in the past decade or so, Google has now taken over 90% of the market in the UK. For that reason, SEO in the UK has primarily been about anticipating and how Google will rank pages, and tweaking web pages to increase their ranking. Ways of doing this include the use of key words and key phrases, the use of relevant meta-tags in the HTML, and the utilisation of link building, which is getting other web pages to link back to the relevant page.
As well as these ‘white hat’ methods, that is methods that are deemed acceptable, there are also those known as ‘black hat’ methods, which many UK companies use. Their unacceptability of these methods has been stated publicly by Google, who has warned that companies using them will have their websites disregarded from the PageRank process.
As a result of these techniques, and of other underhand techniques used by other UK companies, the SEO industry has gathered a certain amount of distrust. This is partly caused by the limited knowledge about SEO enjoyed by those who are not involved in selling it. This lack of knowledge can lead to companies choosing poorly, both in who they get to do their optimising for them, or even in choosing optimisation at all when it is not necessary.
Despite all of this, the UK is still home to a blooming SEO industry. Google’s move to personalised searches didn’t shake the industry, reaching a value of 436m in 2010. This is still due to grow, as businesses are inclined to move their services to the internet. As of March 2011, though, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) will be scrutinising the SEO industry, making things that but more difficult for them in the future.
Get help with SEO Manchester today
