Okay I'm Sir Roger Moore's Official Webmaster, but like the Many of People I Used to Know Nothing About Search Engine Optimisation !

I am going to begin this article doing something which some people might find slightly irritating until hopefully they realise my motives, namedropping some of my well-known clients. Hopefully I'll get over this potentially unproductive introduction by explaining I am not doing this to massage my ego. I'm trying to point out that that even people you would expect to understand Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short, quite often don't. Have you heard of it? Also why in my opinion SEO is so important for the quality of website content on the Internet now and also for obtaining high search engine rankings on Google etc. So if your website is of importance to you, I hope you find my article beneficial in pointing out why it would be good to learn something about SEO.

When you mention SEO the vast majority of people know nothing or very little about the subject. Even more surprisingly that includes Webmaster's who have strong background of website design and the Internet. Until a couple of years ago that included myself who had been designing websites for five years. This is how I became involved in the world of SEO and all its benefits.

The year is 2002 and I'm a chap from Bradford in West Yorkshire who runs a CCTV and security alarm installation company for 20 years. I had also become actively involved a interesting sideline business of website design, along with my partner Mark Nicholls who is a professionally trained website designer.

That same year in my local paper I read that The world-famous psychic Uri Geller was promoting his autobiography at a bookstore in Bradford. I remembered Uri from my childhood in the early 70s, when he was very famous for bending spoons and starting broken watches with his alleged psychic powers. So because of his notoriety and also the fact that Uri wrote a weekly column for Computer Active Magazine which I read, I decided to attend the book signing. Anyway to cut a long story short Uri and myself became acquainted with and he asked me if I'd like to be his Webmaster. That started our friendship which continues until this very day.

Uri used to partially repay me for working on this website by inviting me to London to attend various celebrity bashes, which to an ordinary Joe Bloggs from Bradford were quite novel in the beginning.
At one such event I was privileged enough to meet Sir Roger Moore who is famous for playing many roles, his most famous one being James Bond. Roger had at the time undertaken a vastly more important role than 007, a UNICEF Special Ambassador. I had enjoyed Roger in programs like The Persuaders with Tony Curtis, which was one of my all-time favourites from my childhood in 1971.
I offered my services to Roger as his Webmaster and I was extremely delighted and surprised when Roger accepted. I really like the prospect of helping Roger showcase his UNICEF works on the Internet so by to a small degree helping the charity myself. Over the next few years this has led me into having a few interesting adventures and occasionally rubbing shoulders with well-known celebrities like the late great Michael Jackson and the Hollywood legend Tony Curtis, to mention a few.

Even though we produced website design for a few celebrities and also various UK businesses, we were still unaware of SEO and how important is !

This change in 2007 when I when I took out a mortgage to buy a holiday cottage in Whitby, North Yorkshire. I love the place but unfortunately it is very expensive to buy property in the old town where my cottage is, so I needed to rent the property out to cover the mortgage payments. Obviously Mark and myself had no problem designing a nice looking website for the cottage, but suddenly I realised what's the point a lovely website if very few people find it ! Like the saying goes, needs must. I needed to change this situation fast to obtain plenty of holiday bookings.

I initially I turned to Google ad words which solved the problem and is excellent service. It got my website advertisement immediately as high up the search engine rankings as I was willing to pay for on the sponsored advertising Google runs on the right-hand side of its search engines listings. The beauty of the services is it is almost instantaneous and totally controllable. The more you're willing to pay the more prominently your advertising campaign is seen . There are some technical issues to understand to make Google ads work successfully, but all the information is on Google's instructions. Also I go into more detail on this subject in a previous posting.

The main thing you must do to make Google ad words successful is to choose the correct appropriate keywords to attract the highest possible percentage of people possible that are genuinely interested in what your offering. So by reducing wastage of clicks by people who are just not interested.

Secondly you must then choose carefully the amount you're willing to pay per click per for each individual set of words in your campaign. This then determines where you appear in the sponsored advertising on Google search engine. High competition in your chosen subject will result in higher cost per click to obtain the results you require, obviously with the opposite being true for low competition categories.

Thirdly you must choose your daily budget for each campaign. This is how much you're willing to spend and then comparing the results obtained with Google ad ware tools

In my case in 2007 if my holiday cottage in Whitby in North Yorkshire was empty for the week I was losing hundreds of pounds in lost rental income. Google ad words was my saviour and certainly produced a very good business results for me. I wanted my cottage advertisement ideally to be on page one of Google near to the top of its sponsored advertising. This was totally achievable, but there is a price to pay literally ! Approximately £45 per week at £0.25 a click for the majority of my chosen sets off words was the price. So my Google ad words campaign combine with a well-designed and informative website was achieving almost 100% occupancy for Endeavour Cottage, making it probably one of the most viewed privately owned cottage in Whitby on the Internet. One of the main advantages of Google ad words is you can start a campaign, pause or even stop your campaign at any moment. At this time the cottage was a fledgling business building up its clientele database so I found Google ad words good value. The only downside was it would be slightly expensive if you totally rely on it for your website customers long-term.

I become aware of the fact that what I really needed for my cottage website was to be to be was well listed on the free organic positions on the search engines, which have a major listings down the left-hand side. How do you achieve this, correct search engine optimisation.

When reading about SEO I quickly understood that when employed towards webpage's, SEO is the reason some websites are rank highly on the search engines. Obviously I needed to apply more time to understand SEO. I did what probably a lot of people do in this kind of this position do, I telephoned a few companies that offer as SEO as their service. The only problem I encountered is that when you know very little about SEO you feel quite vulnerable when trying to work out who is offering good value for money. Some SEO companies offer extremely promising results, with reasonable fees. Then a other SEO companies will project the same kind of results with much higher start-up costs for their works and warnings that ongoing continuous SEO and costs will be required to keep the website newly obtained higher search engine rankings.

All very confusing in the beginning especially when you consider that ultimately search engine rankings cannot be guaranteed because you are dependent upon the search engines for results and these governed by laws of their own making. In fact when you read any technical books on the subject possible results are worked out by assessment and comparison of previous results and nothing can be guaranteed. Google is continually improving and changing its SEO criteria, and nobody outside the organisation gets to know definitely its rules. This had the effect of making me feel quite suspicious of the whole subject, and this is what drove me personally to read up and studied the subject so I could conduct my own SEO.

Today most of my websites are placed on page one of Google and other search engines for their most important keywords on the free organic listings. So I can definitely tell you the SEO is worth the investment.

I now know there are some extremely good SEO companies out there that will work extremely hard for their money. Improving your search engine rankings and the content of your website, providing excellent value for money. The good ones also provide the proof of their efforts to achieve this. If done properly this is the best investment you could make for your website.The process is broken down into basically two categories. On page optimisation, which mainly involves the correct keyword research and implementation into your webpage's in the correct fashion. This produces relevant indexing and search engines. Secondly off page optimisation, which involves getting good quality links into your website, producing higher search engine rankings.

So remember there's still the majority of people out there that never consider how important search engine optimisation is for their website content and position on the search engine rankings.

If you would like to know more about Search Engine Optimisation

Likewise if you're a fan of Sir Roger Moore please take a look at his official website Sir Roger Moore

Thank you Alan Davidson

If you would like to take a look at Endeavour Cottage Whitby Holiday Cottage

For all people that like Whitby please take a look at my Information and Guide Website Whitby