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[sociallocker]Does search engine optimisation (SEO) work? It can! It does! Basically, if your type of product or service or even brand name is searched in any kind of significant numbers on Google, Yahoo and/or Bing search engines then there’s potential in SEO for you…if you have the time/expertise/budget and, of course, if your business deserves to be ranked well in the major search engines.
But what if your competitors have already been running the SEO race for a while now. It is like a competition because you have competitors against you. So the analogy of a race or even a boxing match is quite relevant. There’s lots of talk about looking at your competitors’ back links, including the number and quality of links pointing to their sites and the overall linking landscape (i.e. the types of links that they have). It’s up to you if you want to get into SEO and having a great web presence in general because if you do it’s going to cost you money and if you don’t then it’s also likely to cost you money in sales that you don’t get. But I see the decision about whether to have SEO work carried out on your website a pretty easy one. The fact is that there are searchers on Google looking for your type of business and you have to be in it to win it. Ok, no more cliches for the remainder of this article I promise!
When running a race you need to know your potential, you need to pace yourself, you need to know who you’re up against, you need to give it your best. So why don’t businesses always give it their all when it comes to SEO. We’re talking about organic, long-term, ethical, white hat SEO here and it’s always good to consider SEO as a series of races rather than a one-off kind of thing. So having one month’s worth of SEO carried out just isn’t going to cut it. It’s like eating good food to lose weight for one month then going back to eating rubbish but expecting great results throughout. You also can’t eat too much fruit at once in one day then expect this to do you for the whole month. It’s pretty much the same with organic SEO. Think of eating healthy and training for a race as doing everything in balance and doing everything optimally. There are also lots of micro business owners and larger businesses alike who pick from different SEO suppliers and some even choose a different supplier each month. Do professional boxers change their trainers every month? No. They find a trainer who they can trust, one who is reputable, one who has gotten good results for other boxers and they stick with them.[/sociallocker]
