SEO UK

What Exactly Is SEO?

For the uninitiated, the world of SEO can be both confusing and intimidating. All of the problems of marketing in general are present in the world of SEO, and this is especially true for SEO UK.

Geographical Considerations

Marketing is always about targeting the audience, and the audience for any particular country can be either easy or difficult to reach, depending on the approach. There are two basic models for small businesses to work with in terms of communicating a message to a particular market. The first is the DIY approach, and the second is to pay for services, hopefully on the reliable recommendation of a colleague.

White Hat Vs. Black Hat

Understanding SEO in your own terms basically means developing a personal relationship with the principles of search engine operation in the first place. For a small or medium business, this means that the "rules" of Google and Yahoo need to take priority, which creates the difference between white hat and black hat SEO. Since these may be new terms for some, a few basics are in order. Some SEO experts are of the opinion that these are defunct terms, but the difference is whether or not you choose to "play by the rules." In order to determine what these rules are, the first place to look is the documentation provided by Google and Yahoo themselves, which is meant to encourage marketers to give the people (real site viewers) what they want.

Since developing a relationship with these rules can seem arduous, many developers and SEO experts have chosen to do whatever it takes to get traffic, including seeding the Web with back-links, which provide no real content, and spamming email addresses until it hurts. Either way, the ultimate goal is to increase the page rank (Pr) of the site where products are sold, or to increase traffic to pre-sale sites that deliver traffic directly to a sales page.

Targeting Traffic For The UK

If your market is bound entirely by one group of people, then they are easy to reach. PPC (pay per click) marketing campaigns will only display banners in the geographies which are specifically indicated by the PPC campaign itself. Simple tools are offered by Google and Yahoo to ensure that banners are only displayed to IP addresses within a given geography. The trick here is that this limitation dramatically decreases the viability of individual keywords. One keyword may receive 50,000 searches per month according to Google, but perhaps none of these come from the UK. So, in order to target a geographically-specific market, keywords should be chosen which reflect the preferences of that market. For example, keywords should be researched which use only UK spelling in order to increase the accuracy of such research.

Targeting Your Website Visitors

So, even though research tools may cause SEO to seem simple, the reality is that these numbers reflect varying degrees of market complexity. Every click is unique, and finding the most targeted clicks means choosing a service which is familiar with the nuts and bolts of each individual keyword. A few well engineered banners will produce results hundreds of times more effective than thousands of banners which rely on only the most basic marketing logic.