Can you put a web page together? Add more, and build them into a website? Even if you are using cutting edge web page building software you have probably had to struggle through learning HTML, CSS, at least some PHP, and probably still more of the “alphabet soup” you have to swim through to become a website developer. On top of that you found you had to be a fairly skilled writer and designer in the course of your website content development.

So after all that you managed to build a website, and even climb the next hurdle of getting it published. Thought you were on top of it didn’t you? Did you feel pretty proud of yourself? But what happened next? Was your website then ignored by the search engines? Did you wonder where your visitors were? Did you begin to wonder what was the point of all that effort? You are not alone.

Being able to build and publish a website is no small accomplishment, but then you are only half way there at best. It’s like climbing a mountain: whenever you think you have reached the top of the slope you can see ahead you find the real top is further up, and then when you are on the ridge you find that there is a higher peak yet waiting to be conquered further along.

Hidden away from most of us there is a mysterious body of website development and content management knowledge, often referred to as search engine optimization or search engine marketing. Much of it is a dark art, more akin to astrology and alchemy than to astronomy or chemistry. It’s all about getting your website to the top of the search engine listings, and attracting search traffic. It’s a bit like turning lead into gold, reaching the Holy Grail, or getting to the pot of gold at the bottom of the rainbow. If you can get there a fortune can be made, but it is an elusive goal.

The thing is, the search engines really don’t tell anyone exactly how they work, and, moreover, their methods keep evolving. The practitioners of this dark art are compelled to keep guessing and testing their hypotheses to try and keep up with the search engines. And no sooner do they find a clever trick that gives them an advantage, somebody changes the rules. Just ask the enthusiasts who flooded Wikipedia with back links to their websites, only to find the search engines suddenly stopped following them. Checkmate. Game over. All that effort wasted.

The very best search engine marketers apply a simple rule: what is good for the website user is almost certainly good for the search engines. They also recognize that the search engine developers have been working hard to make sure website users have a good experience, and have come up with some very clever methods that can be understood and worked with, such as latent semantic indexing. And they are leery about whether it is worth the effort to find and exploit loop holes that might give a temporary advantage. Follow the sound principles of website development and content management that they have discovered and all that website building effort becomes worthwhile. But those that fail to take that extra step invariably fall short of their goal, and their website languishes among the millions of web pages hardly anyone looks at.

This hard-earned search engine marketing information has a high value, and access has long been limited to an inner circle of corporate experts and top consultants, or to expensive personal coaching memberships. The rest of us have been left with rumors, speculation and half-truths, not knowing what really works today, and what is already obsolete knowledge, or about to become redundant as the search engines move on.

Fortunately a small number of experts have begun making the art of search engine marketing more accessible to the average website builder. They explain the methods used by the search engines and how to benefit from designing your website, its content and its promotion to work with rather than around the search engines. Unless you take the trouble to learn these professional secrets of website development, content management and promotion from these experts, all the effort you took to get your website published will almost certainly be wasted.

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