A lot of rubbish has been written about search engine optimisation and a lot of companies and so-called search engine optimisation experts offer a service which more often than not is doomed to failure, or worse, actually gets you banned by the search engines for malpractice.

It's really very simple.

If you have the most informative resource for the visitor, under a particular search phrase, then you will get a good ranking and all the commercial benefits that come with it.

If your site is a thin sales site or brochure site, then the search engines will not consider it to be of importance and you won’t get ranked. You will then have to undertake all kinds of off-line and paid for on-line marketing to get traffic but you won’t get the ‘free’ traffic that’s out there. You could try other less legitimate ways of achieving success but they are equally likely to get your site blacklisted, and in the world of search engines there is no appeal court.

So, use search engine optimisation to offer the richest, most informative resource and you will get traffic. Of course it is a competitive thing. Some sectors already have very good websites but oddly the search engines very rarely reflect the pecking order in the business world as businesses have been slow to build sites that reflect their sector position. It’s a bit like going to a tradeshow where the biggest stands are owned by the guys who have been coming to the show for the longest time!

Often you find all kinds of amateur sites at the top of a search engine just because they started earlier and have built more content over a longer period.

Our mission here is to help companies regain their rightful standing in the search engines' ranking and to get the benefit of the free traffic and be seen as important players in their sector truly reflecting their standing in the marketplace. To do this, we use our search engine optimisation expertise.

So, what's our first tip?

1. Avoid ‘magicians’

Not helped by the secrecy and the lack of accountability of the search engines themselves, there is a huge amount of misinformation out there about search engine optimisation.

The good news is that search engine optimisation is a quantifiable process and you don’t need merlins and wizards to make it happen.

Of course if you really could get to number one on Google in a few weeks by spending no more than a few hundred pounds then wouldn’t everyone have done it? We’d all be at number one!

For a start Google won’t even rank you for the first three months of a new website. Known as the “sandbox”, search engine optimisation companies often gloss over this material fact in the rush to close business.

The tasks that needed to be completed are well documented and not mysterious at all; they just need to be done quickly and efficiently. Any good search engine optimisation company will explain those tasks and the realistic timescales without any myth or magic and a detailed schedule of work should be provided.

Anyone being truthful about the subject will tell you that it is going to take between six and twelve months to generate the rankings and results that the client wants. And in the meantime there are all kinds of other techniques for generating traffic. But the ultimate kudos (and the most traffic) goes to the business with that Page One or even Number One rank.

And this is not to be underestimated. Having Google say that your site is the best in the world is a powerful sales message to your clients.