What is SEO	A Real Live example
A Real Live example 55 000 people in South Africa Google the word “Car Insurance”. There is huge value in appearing on the first page for this keyword, since you will be exposed to thousands of people for free.   These 3 sites are exposed to 55 000 people per month for just this one keyword.   DID YOU KNOW? Only 16% of Google’s searchers look beyond the first two pages of search results. With 40% of shopping soon to be online, being on these two pages really matters. You must practice “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) to be at the top of the list.

 

SEO Services - Link Building

Link building activities consists of ensuring that websites have greater exposure in search engines by making sure that a website exposure increases. We do this by building links into your site that pertain to our clients business.
Most of the search engines today work on the basis that if a website has a number of other sites linked to it, there is then an increase in the sites importance and reputation therefore the site will be placed higher in the results pages (SERPS). Which is where you want to be.
There are a variety of link building activities that can be done. This is often a labour intensive process and this is where the bulk of our Internet Marketing activities are focused on.
Here are some of the strategies that we follow:

• Submission to high quality web directories. Please note that this is NOT a submission service to hundreds of thousands of 'search engines' and directories. This is a dangerous activity that can damage your site.
  
• Exchanging links with relevant sites
  
• Develop written articles that contain useful information that direct users back to your site.
  
• Increase your website's exposure by making use of certain Web 2.0 related strategies

SEO Services - Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO. If you target the wrong keywords, all your efforts will be for nothing.
What are keywords? Keywords or search terms, are the words used by people when they search for information on the Internet using a search engine. When people are looking for web design services, for example, they might type in the words: "web design" into a search engine such as Google or MSN. The whole term "web design" is then seen as a 'keyword' (not just the word "web" or the word "design").
People might also type in "web page design". This is a different keyword altogether, amalgamating in millions of keywords! In July 2008 Google served 242 million searches a day (http://searchenginewatch.com/3630718) – most of which were unique terms.
That being said, it is important to note that keywords, or search terms, do tend to cluster together. In fact there is a very well-known statistical phenomenon that is popularly known as the 'long tail' that can be applied to the way that Internet searches are performed.

What is probably not well understood is that it is necessary to 'target' a keyword when doing SEO and Internet Marketing. Your website just cannot perform equally well in the search engines for all search terms. In other words, you would not expect your website to be displayed on the first page of Google if someone searches for the term 'make money' when your site sells wedding dresses, now would you? But in the wedding dress industry, if 'wedding dress' is a keyword that is searched for a lot, and does not have too much competition, then it is a good word to 'target' in SEO efforts. It is this 'targeting' that forms the bulk of SEO and Internet Marketing activities, and it is therefore vitally important to understand which keywords are the best ones to target.
This is why keyword research forms such an important basis of an SEO strategy.

SEO Services – On-site Optimisation

The second activity to perform is 'on-site optimisation'. This is usually what is understood by most people to be the bulk of work in SEO.
When we get requests for website design, our potential client would often ask if SEO is included in the cost of the website and if we say no, they are normally taken aback since it is a service that is often offered as part of a website design package by other web designers.
On closer inspection, this normally consists of updating the website's 'meta tags'. Unfortunately often the client is left with the impression that this would be enough to catapult his/her website to the top of the search engines.
The truth is that the 'on-site' factors are often the smallest component of the whole SEO/Internet Marketing effort. Why is that?
One needs to take a look at the history of search engines to understand why this is the case. In previous years (BG – Before Google), search engines analyzed the actual web page for clues as to what the page is about, so that it could decide whether the page should appear high up in the Search Engine Results Pages (also commonly known as 'SERPS'). The various elements that were used in this analysis would be mostly the 'meta tags' and the words on the page (keyword density).
The 'meta tags' are hidden text elements that is not visible on the actual web page, but which are visible to the search engines. These tags mainly consist of the page title (not strictly a meta tag, but very important nonetheless), the meta 'description' tag and that overused, over-abused tag, the 'keywords' meta tag.

These tags are supposed to contain the main keywords and then voila!, your site will magically rise to the top of the search engines. Unfortunately these days (AG – After Google), this is no longer the case. The reason is that;

1. it was very easy for people to manipulate these tags and stuff them with keywords, thereby manipulating the search engine results and thereby rendering the search results increasingly meaningless and
   
2. Google changed the face of search engines by using a different algorithm. Google largely ignores the meta tags!
   The most important tag on the page is the Title tag. Apart from that, Google only assigns a very small importance to aspects such as keyword density, h1, h2, h3 etc tags and the actual meta tags.

We do optimise the website – making sure that each page has unique title tags, making sure that the description and keyword meta tags are unique and well structured, making sure that on the relevant pages the keyword density is high enough but not too high to trigger alarms (if it is too high, the site may be considered 'spammy' and penalised).

However, we do not agonise too much over this step, and what is important to note is that this step just cannot be done without having done the keyword research first, else a lot of effort might be put in to something that is ultimately a waste of time. This is largely the reason why this activity is not automatically included in our web design services.