Perhaps like others I felt a website would be a good idea to assist with launching my new business, but when it comes to getting listed in a place on google more than 10 pages after the vast miriad of business directories all claiming to give you access the the best electricians in the country I have began to think that google is just a huge directory of directories and therefore and complete waste of virtual space.................?
Well, the cynical among us might understand that this was "kind of" Google's plan all along, as it allows them a revenue stream and makes them a "real" business. The revenue stream it allows them is in areas such as paid advertising (Adsense), filtered searching, and of course, commercially, it allows them to remain dominant in the information market.
Can you imagine the Yellow Pages asking to advertise with you, for example?
That said, Google are also aware of the phase shift in SEO and calculate carefully the value of the links they return for any given search - it is all about what those cute li'l Americans so lovingly term "monetization" after all.
Manipulating your website to appear high in the rankings is not difficult - just a little more involved than it used to be. And it is a lot easier if your focus is on a specific geographical market, and the smaller the better in terms of ranking quickly.
Essentially, high rankings in Google come down to (a) time, (b) good, relevant content, (c) Good Use of Headings, (d) Keyword relevance, an (e) well structured pages which Googlebot can read (a sitemap), with the right weight of code to (relevant) content.
Whether we like it or not, it is fairly essential, if you have a website, to play ball the Google way - it is the "go to" search of choice - over 60% of the online globe now uses it (by independent survey) as their preferred means of finding something - and that alone makes it number one by some significant margin. Bing, by contrast, attracts only about 8% of the search market globally (still worth Billions)....so worth doing optimisation for Bing and Yahoo too (who are joining forces).
So, not difficult, just an added layer to website design, as necessary these days as the HTML used to code the page.
