SEO tips for beginners offered

04/08/2008

Businesses starting out on their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns have been offered expert advice on how to propel their sites into the upper reaches of search engine results pages.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News, Tim McAtee of MarketingSherpa explained that SEO is important as between 60 and 70 per cent of those who use search engines only look at the first results page.

Understanding the roles of spiders, crawlers and robots in searching websites for relevant content and the resulting importance of keywords in URLs, page titles and links can help, according to other experts speaking to the newspaper.

Allie Herzog, new media director at US-based HJMT Communications, also said that it may be useful to keep tabs on the keywords being used by competitors.

"If you're looking for more tips, the major search engines lay out specific rules you must follow to garner top positions," the San Jose Mercury News stated.

"Do a search under 'webmaster guidelines' in each of the major search engines to access this information."

According to a recent Internet Retailer study, many major retail e-commerce brands do not do enough to boost SEO, despite seeing success in paid advertising.