SEO internet marketing techniques

It's ironic to think that in cyberspace the librarians are now more important than the library, but that's exactly what's happened with search engines and the World Wide Web. Traditional internet marketing techniques have focused on producing robust brands (often through offline advertising) and only recently have companies begun to realise the benefits of getting the search engines to do the work for them. The theory is simple: if you add a good book to a library's catalogue; then it will be in the librarian's interest to recommend it to their readers. In real terms this means that your website begins to climb up the rankings.

The cornerstone of all successful SEO marketing is to work with, rather than against, the search engines. Because all search engines work by crunching data they are open to human exploitation and it's perfectly possible to get any site to the top of any results page; providing you have the resources and the know-how. The difficulty comes in getting it to stay there. All leading search engines employ teams of editors to manually review the top listings to ensure that they are supplying their users the best possible results. Poor sites are either removed form the index and banned or the algorithm governing the SERPS is tweaked to ensure that they disappear into obscurity.

Constantly changing algorithms mean that there's no such thing as a 'quick fix', and anyone who tells you there is; is either grossly mistaken or (more likely) trying to get their hands on your marketing budget. Instead SEO should be approached as a game, with you pitting your wits against the brainpower behind the engines. If you're serious about SEO; you'll need to be in it for the long haul.

Each search engine weights its results according to a different set of (ever changing) criteria and you may find that you're ranking well in one engine and can't find your site in another. Spend as much time as you can networking with likeminded souls and chatting on webmaster forums. Don't be afraid to experiment with a variety of 'on' and 'off' page factors, and bear in mind that success in internet marketing won't happen overnight.