SEO really does work.

A while ago we posted about some really excellent results that our SEO work had achieved and yesterday I was talking to someone about just how important SEO was to them.

I was literally amazed when I was told that SEO had probably saved their business and they were now getting a good number of quality leads nearly every day that they were converting to sales.

Quite often we see people pull a face, or raise their eyebrows when we provide them with a quote to perform SEO on their site, especially as there are no guarantees as to what position can actually be achieved.

It's really good to hear real life scenarios of SEO working its magic though, and it proves that in the long term that any SEO investment is worth its weight in gold.

SERP. What does it mean?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.

Many people aren't aware of the competitive nature of SERPs positioning, but it is very competitive. Keep in mind that you are ranked in comparison with the other sites in the results.

If the search engine thinks that your content is more relevant, then you rank higher, if it is determined that your content is less relevant, then you fall in the results. If they know what they are doing, the other sites showing up for the searches you wish to rank high in are watching you, and the other sites on the first two pages to see what they are doing, and if they are rising or falling.

So how do you ensure that you can rank well against the other sites out there and rise in the SERPs? Well, for starters, let's assume that there are only three search engines, because frankly, Google, Yahoo, and MSN (in that order) represent the vast majority of searches and Google represents the vast majority amongst those three.

There used to be many ways to get the search engines to pay more attention to your page, but the number one tip is now this: Write human readable content that has value and real relevancy. Make sure that you use the words and phrases you think people will search for, and do use them more than once, but don't go overboard. Bolding and using larger fonts (and H1 tags) will help as well, but don't overdo it. If you make your page look too wonky it will not work for the second type of optimisation.

Here's a quick checklist of things to make sure you do in terms of On Page optimisation.

• Make the page title descriptive, and if possible different for each page.
• Use the meta description tag and make it good - this is what most search engines show as the description about your site on the results page.
• Use clean HTML formatting so that the Search Engine can easily read your page.
• Make sure you use your keywords in your copy more than once and if it works bold them.
• If you can make it work, use an H1 or H2 tag. If you are comfortable with CSS you can make the text in them smaller (this is becoming less and less important).
• Make sure to use alt and title tags on images. It lets the search engines know what the image is about and can cause your images to show up on the Google image search. Use title tags on your links. It will help the search engines know more about the page you are linking to and improve relevancy.
• Don't put too many links to other sites. Links out lower your page's importance.