Just like many other SEO firms, we all started out as a group of people involved with the Internet in some way, but not knowing exactly how SEO worked. Over 10 years ago, when we first wanted to make sure our websites we controlled were performing well in the search engines, the only real place to get help was online. Having said that, most markets were easy to got into the top positions, but such is the competition now that you either get SEO help or stay out of the first pages.

So what kind of help is available? Well there are a few ways of getting the desired results for your chosen keywords, and it basically comes down to those ‘key words’ you choose how to approach this. If you have a couple of very specialised phrases that describe your service, and the competition is quite low, then given time there is plenty of SEO help online. There are thousands of articles, blogs, tips and reviews about how to manage a small but effective campaign. It will focus on a few key methods, including link building, creating good content and managing the internal structure.

When your needs are slightly more demanding, the SEO help you need will be in the form of an SEO specialist or a SEO consultant. This is true for all sought after key phrases now, we would say any that get more than 5,000 searches on Google every month. When you have say 50 of these phrases to aim at, then SEO help has to come in the form of an external company.

The only other option at this stage would be to employ full time SEO help, and it certainly is more popular now to see someone on head count for the large retail e-tailers. The only problem in this instance is that while it is beneficial to have someone 40 hours a week working on link building and social networking, they are quite often not capable of structuring a campaign themselves. There can also be difficulties in matching the combined experience and know how of an SEO firm which has many employees and different campaigns.

With the emergence of SEO as a marketing tool and a way to gain sales, the hype and increase in popularity has pretty much been expected. Just like TV in the 70’s and 80’s had it’s boom, the Internet has become a massive advertising platform in the space of under a decade- due to the number of people online.

For this reason there are business people expressing interest in SEO, maybe people who would not have considered it a few years ago. Some are sceptical, and rightly so. Not every campaign is a blazing success, and there are quite a few SEO companies who take a small retainer off many firms and do very little. With little consequence too, as the industry is hardly under a governing body, and most contracts in SEO are water tight should you not get a top 10. No guarantees….

So we find ourselves working in a market where there are more and more SEO reviews, offered on different platforms in differing formats. The SEO review that the everyday small business owner will most likely find is surely on Google local. After all, searching for a local company offering a service brings up these listings first on 9 out of 10 occasions. They offer often scarily frank, unedited or certainly un-moderated reviews of SEO providers in a certain location.

Other places you will find an SEO review are on the bigger more professional sites, like Econsultancy and certain marketing journals. We found the most genuine and well moderated reviews came from proper traditional marketing magazines- which are obviously available online too. They try to speak with clients of the bigger firms and offer well balanced and informative details of how the services were perceived.

The one thing you should remember, is that when you look for an SEO review, there is a great chance that the sites you find online are offering a service or product themselves. This could be in the form of an SEO company masking reviews with details of their work, or software companies trying to sell SEO packages for DIY SEO. Either way, the people best at getting to the top of Google for these kind of reviews are, unfortunately, SEO providers.

To imagine a way of employing an SEO technique to get further up the rankings is an odd way of looking at the many ways to improve your website. Like a mechanic taking a spanner to an engine, SEO is much more practical than most people may think, and the whole practice of SEO is a set of techniques that create a well rounded campaign.

SEO techniques are no myth either. Unlike a Psychologist who may have a certain opinion about how to deal with a particular case, all SEO techniques are very much set in stone (at time of press!) and no one can question the elements involved. One reason why you would refer to the way a firm may attack a failing website as a technique, is to do with the nature of the key phrases and stage the website is it. Here we explore a couple of cases that we have encountered where we decided to use differing SEO techniques.

If a website is brand new, has just a few pages and really needs working over, we would certainly use a good mix of all the different ingredients that are available in search engine marketing. We would concentrate on design, the html structure, and then look at all the key-phrases involved for the relevant markets. Then the next step in to embark of creating a lot of good content and making sure that an ongoing, aggressive link building campaign is put in place. Alongside this there would be a large scale social networking effort to complement the rest of the SEO techniques.

When a website is established, has a good solid PageRank and is full of decent content, we would normally only be approached if the company in need found themselves in an ultra-competitive marketplace. If this is the case, then we would almost certainly start to work on a campaign based on tecniques to create external and internal backlinks. This is a more difficult and revvered technique in SEO, something that most SEO companies struggle with. It’s where you earn your money and is an entirely different kind of structured marketing to the basic SEO technique that most webmasters could learn themselves.

SEO is such a new science, one that is expanding all the time. This means SEO techniques will always be a mix of the different elements that make a website popular, and be warned that as the industry changes, and the search engines get smarter, the techniques will inevitably change given time.

One obvious problem with browsing the Internet on a mobile device is the display size, and ability to find what you what on a web page. This is especially true of most e-commerce websites and search results pages on search engines.

Whilst most people don’t tend to look for retail items while travelling around, things we do actively seek are places of interest, restaurants and cafe’s and service providers like car garages. To help browsers get to the contact details of a page Google, through their Adwords programme, have introduced ‘Call To Click’. This is a feature designed to bring the contact details for a company to the top of the page in a mobile web browsing device, commonly known as Android phones.

By introducing this handy element into the handheld search results, Google have really made life much easier for the public to use the Internet quickly on their phones. While we wait for technology to improve, or even a different kind of application for web pages on smaller screens, this has resolved an issue many consumers had.

Google in turn will be hoping that local businesses will see the benefit in the service and sign up (if haven’t already done so) for Adwords. This means they will need to have a PPC campaign in place to use the service, something which undoubtedly inspired Google to invest in this new feature. The company will also have to opt in to the mobile content network.

In the past many firms have opted out of the mobile content network in favour of the desktop results (with Adwords). SEO firms target those paying for adverts in mobile network results as having a poor return on investment, and being harder to track for potential pay per click fraud. This is due to many millions of blogs around the World displaying ads through Adsense, and there are always reports of click abuse.

When we think about tools in terms of Internet related work it usually means software and also applications. This is certainly true when it comes to SEO tools and there are now literally hundreds of different kinds of packages and web based applications that can be utilised in the chase for better rankings.

The only kind of software tools for SEO are those that manage campaigns, the ones that submit content, plus a few which look after search engine submissions. Software for SEO management is now becoming serious in terms of ability and need; try managing a large SEO campaign for a firm (with hundreds of target phrases) without this kind of tool and you’ll struggle.

The main reasons to employ this kind of tool is the bulk of a large project being too difficult to manage in typical packages like Microsoft Excel or standard database of some sort. Modern software tools for SEO have the ability to check multiple SERP positions, identify link partners and compare against competition standings.

Web based SEO tools are quite common but often limited in their ability, especially as the more difficult aspects to SEO are rightly charged for instead of being offered online for free. This doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of invaluable tools for ultra important parts of search engine optimising to be found on the Internet. Find a site you like that offers a host of tools and bookmark it- we have a few favourites and use them on a daily basis for the following kind of work:

• Adsense Calculator for checking the cost of specific phrases
• Advanced meta tags generator that helps find the best format for meta
• Alexa Rank Tool to find the popularity of a website with Alexa
• Code to Text Ratio to make sure a page is of the right density for coding against real text
• Domain Age Check – quickly check how old a website is
• Indexed Pages to see what number of pages have been cached by certain search engines
• Keyword Density for an all important check on the theme for a set URL
• Keyword Difficulty – to see just how hard one particular word or phrase is to get up the rankings for

These are not the only tools you can find online but a few of the most influential in running a successful site. There are more tools being promoted every day and we look forward to the advancement of this kind of web based help, and advise our clients to use the basic ones when creating new content for products or a service they offer.