Website optimisation is the correct term for search engine optimisation. Optimisers actually optimise websites for the search engines and website optimisation is the process of gaining high website rankings.

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Q. What is the difference between website optimisation and search engine optimisation?

A. Nothing. Search engine optimisation is actually a term for optimising a website for the search engines. It’s an American term, which is a little misleading, but what else would you expect from a country who’s President thinks that Latin Americans speak Latin. Website or search engine optimisers cannot alter or interfere with the algorithms of the search engines, only optimise a website so that it performs in a manner that the search engines will appreciate. We don’t optimise the search engines; we don’t do anything to the search engines at all.

Q. When is the best time to optimise a website?

A. Ideally, an optimiser should be included at the very beginning of a design project, even before the designers start. It is less time consuming for an optimiser to lay out the optimisation requirements at the beginning than to go through an existing website correcting the mistakes, rerouting links and rewriting the text. A good website designer will ask an optimiser to provide the skeletal framework of the site and build the website around the framework the optimiser provided.

Q. Do you ever decline an optimisation job because it is too big a task?

A. That hasn’t happened yet. We have gained top ten rankings on Google where there were 300+ million pages indexed. Those types of jobs are quite scary, especially when you know you may have weeks of work and might not get paid for months if it doesn’t go strictly to plan. However, we are always excited by a challenge and we built our reputation on achieving the results that other website optimisation companies have failed to achieve.

Q. What happens to the websites you have optimised when the search engines change their algorithms?

A. Normally nothing, they stay where they are, we have web pages that have been top of Google for eight years. If a website has been correctly optimise, the pages will be imbedded in the search engines. A web page is like a report that is sent up to the search engines, if it was highly relevant before, it still will be after the search engines change their procedures. It is only when an optimiser has tried to fool the search engines or used illegitimate procedures that websites drop in the rankings. Algorithms may change but they still have one major purpose and that is to return relevant pages for a given search term.

Q. Is website optimisation only about gaining high ranking in the search engines?

A. No, but in theory anything that drives more traffic to a website will determine the final position where the search engines will rank it. Good linking strategies help more with generating traffic than the myth about link popularity. Exchanging links does not fool most of the major search engines into thinking you have an important website. It is because of the extra traffic you can get through correctly set up links, that Google will rank a site higher. However, most links are not set up in the right way, so employing companies to manage a link campaign is simply money wasted.

Q. What other optimisation techniques do you use?

A. Without giving any secrets away I would be reluctant to say. Most of our optimisation techniques are not actually visible to the untrained eye and many are not obvious to even the most experienced optimisers. We use a number of techniques that we know are unique to us. We have a greater understanding of what works and why and often, other optimisers are getting results but misinterpreting the reasons why, so when they try to repeat that success with another website, they don’t understand why it doesn’t work.

Q. Any other tips you can offer?

A. We get more traffic to websites that we optimise because we look at the Internet like one long high street. If you look at the retail trade, complimentary businesses tend to thrive when they are close together and businesses pay a premium to be near the big stores like BHS and Marks and Sparks. When we optimise websites, we take the same approach so that our websites benefit from traffic from related businesses and high levels of passing trade.

Paul Herbert is CEO of the Where On Earth Group, Europe’s largest internetwork and leading website optimisation company.

MetaVisa UK and Scopula, the search engine optimisation division of the company, work together to build high performance websites for the search engines.

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