Bad SEO can be likened to normal central heating, it does not cover all the bases, and once the heat is turned off the room cools down quite quickly. Good SEO on the other hand is more like underfloor heating, which is much more efficient as it heats the entire room from beneath, and that heat hangs around for a long time after the heating is switched off. It is a most thorough form of heating; like a good SEO campaign that covers every aspect of a website – be it titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, SEO friendly content, linking, blogs – all of these things give a website the best possible chance. It starts from the very bottom – and that’s what your SEO needs – just because it is hidden doesn’t mean it’s not doing something.

If anyone ever asks you what SEO is, just tell them that it’s like underfloor heating!

The term returned more than 19 million results in which a large percentage of the results redirect users towards a site called soft4pcs.com. The site contains a number of pirated copies of popular software titles and works by putting up a fake prospect of being an online store offering cheap products. Users are then attracted to the ‘cheap’ product and so enter in their details where the attackers take away what they need.

Other attacks have been seen from a group called ASProx which is a botnet, injecting malicious links into ASP WebPages that have been incorrectly configured. Searches that have been made for terms like ‘used corvette parts’ have returned results pointing to a page that has redirected users to ads-t.ru that has attempted to serve a hostile Adobe Flash file which installs malware onto computers.

Researchers have reported that Google has more than 3.2 million results containing sites with malicious script and its rival Bing showing 188 million results. Those figures reduced significantly for the same search terms after many blogs and warning were posted across the internet. The attacks only reveal just how intricate the role of search engines, domain name registrars, webhosts and websites play in the potential for scamming a large number of people.

The problem also arises when the web pages that have been compromised are found to be hosted by legitimate websites, which appear to have administrators who have not been careful. Some of the victim websites have included Stanford University, Official Webby Awards site and the official website for 1980’s musician Bryan Adams. It has been said that the attackers would not compromise these sites if Google did not feature them as prominently in their results.

Currently Google use algorithmic and manual techniques to pinpoint the scammers and removing them immediately. However, the difficulty lies in these criminals finding new ways to compromise web pages and thus constantly succeeding in tricking Google and other small search engine programs. Nevertheless, Google and Microsoft’s security team are continuing in their efforts to prevent and remove malicious links from their search results flagging sites as they go along.

To see more in-depth information on how these rogue activities are effecting search results read the following blog post from Unmask Parasites when they demonstrate the extend of the issue and how users and search results are being maniplucated.

While there can be no definite answer to this, many SEO experts agree that poor quality writing is likely to be demoted by Google. Some say that it scans blocks of text much in the same way as a word processor does – highlighting basic grammatical errors as well as spelling mistakes. While one or two typos or misspellings are not going to have an adverse effect, a piece of copy that is littered with errors is probably going to be given a rap on the knuckles by Google.

As far as writers of the English language are concerned, this can only be a good thing – if Content is King then Grammar is his Gold and Spelling is his Silver; it seem that Google’s insistence on good copy is securing many an SEO copywriter’s job.

Good SEO is time consuming and requires good writing. It looks like this isn’t going to change anytime soon, so the Search Engine Optimisation economy is set to continue booming. It sometimes seems that Google doesn’t actually like SEO companies – after all, they’re working Google’s system, and in many cases circumventing the obstacles Google puts up to secure high quality content across the internet. But that’s SEO.

But how does having a splash page affect your SEO? The truth is that most of the SEO community would tell you it’s a bad idea. Often, the problem lies in the fact that a print designer has been given the job of doing the splash page – and indeed the design of the entire site; the hitch is that print designers frequently have more interest in how pretty their splash page looks, rather than how well Google can index the website.

While presentation is of course very important, as it always has been, there’s no point looking beautiful if no one can find you. A splash page is frequently bereft of any text – and of course Google’s algorithm is not interested – Google does not appreciate good print design, Google is a literary animal and needs good, relevant copy.

If you’re a very well established corporation – that has countless back links – you can afford to have a mesmerising splash page. But if you’re a small or even medium sized company, you would be well advised to have a home page with some well written content containing all your primary (and secondary) key phrases. In short, get rid of that splash page now!

Search engine optimisation, or SEO as it is vastly becoming known, is quickly becoming more and more of an influential factor for many businesses both large and small. Over the last few years the internet ‘boom’ has shaken up the marketing industry and now every business worth its cause has an online presence in one way or another.
Web design has become a huge industry as business turn to the internet to expand their target market and their client base however its all well and good having a visually stunning user friendly website but what is the point if no one can find it? This is where SEO comes into play.

In its most basic form, search engine optimisation is a method of promoting a website online by raising the visibility of the website within popular search engines for key phrases relevant to the organisation in question. By doing this a business can increase its authority within its primary target market, promote its target market to a far wider audience increasing brand awareness, generating in more customers, and ultimately generating more money, making visibility within search is essential for any business!

Compliant search engine optimisation is far from an easy task. Anyone with any SEO knowledge will tell you the many different ways in which a website can be penalised for using non-compliant techniques to maliciously promote a website within search, which in turn can have a substantially detrimental affect on a business. This is a ‘black-hat’ practice which many ‘apparently seo’ companies tend to use; unfortunately the benefits are soon forgotten once a website has been penalised within search making the website pretty much inaccessible for potential customers.

Anyway I’ve given you the most basic of overviews so I will leave it at that for now however I will certainly be delving deeper into the world of search engine optimisation as time goes on.

Chris