Rough seas with huge swells for those among us with websites that need marketing. Just the SEM buzzwords are a mission to keep up with as they seem to increase by at least a word a day. Probably in the not so distant future Internet Marketers will be able to speak their own language. Older words like organic rankings, long tail visibility, deep linking and even negative off page weight calculation are all apparently still relevant in the latest search algorithms but there are a plethora of new factors and weight ratios that seems to endlessly be in always predictable flux.
SEO 101 teaches the following golden principles, which in the last ten years have never changed:
1. High quality original content
2. Quality and standards compliant web page production (http://validator.w3.org)
3. Active interest from visitors or recognition to your page from other pages on the Internet
If you are completely unsure about SEO and SEM just read through the 3 Golden rules above, that is really all that you have to know as these three factors combined is more than half of what you need to succeed in organic rankings.
Other important factors in SEO is of course the obvious basics, your page should have a name (Title) in relation to the content on the page, additional relevant meta tags are always a good thing, having a large font heading on text and quoting references in your content to external sources that confirm or add value to your own content.
When do you know that you need a search professional?
When that last 1 to 5 percent of SEO and SEM makes the difference between being number one or being on the second page of a specific keyword result. In fact you probably need a search professional when it is crucial for your business to be the number one answer on all search engines for a specific keyword, keywords or long tails.