Getting to know someone has stretched beyond simply grabbing a cup of coffee and chatting about interests. The digital revolution has given us tools to see into a person’s past, and let’s be honest – who hasn’t taken a sneak peak at a new friend or employee via a quick Google search or some
friendly “Facebook-stalking”. But sadly, not all our best moments are showcased
online and the top search results that Google pulls up may be less than favourable.

A strong healthy website should be flourishing at the top of Google generating sales, consumer interaction and a digital buzz. Unfortunately though, maintaining a healthy digital profile requires constant attention and tailored actions to achieve this goal. It’s a lot like getting your body fit and in its peak condition. It takes a persistent exercise regimen, balanced diet, and continual work.

Making decisions can be one of the most difficult processes in business. It is sometimes just plain scary to commit to a specific choice that will surely cost you time and money. Though this is a necessary process of building your enterprise, it is always tough to face the opportunity cost of your choices. Opportunity cost is an economical tool used to define the cost of a decision based on what must be given up as a result of that decision.

Yes it’s true, everyone is striving to make it to the top; the top of Google that is. This multinational internet search engine is known to process over one billion search requests each day and has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centres worldwide! It only makes sense to want to be the first candidate to pop up and be revealed to curious browsers and potential clients. But this highly used tool is a relatively new phenomenon that has taken hold of our culture since the late 90’s.

One of the factors that influences website ranking and bounce rate (visitors coming to your website and leaving without visiting another page) is the website loading speed. Fortunately for website owners Google has introduced an online page speed tool to measure speed and suggest ways to improve.

The concept behind the initiative is to “hide sites to find more of what you want”. It is quite common to do an internet search and get some results that are of no interest to you, using this new feature you can effectively filter these websites out of the search results, therefore having a results page specifically tailored to your wants and needs.

Although anyone that does a Google search will see that there is an option to block a website, the functionality will only work if you are logged into your account.

On 24th February 2011 Google announced on their blog that major changes were afoot. The change described by Google as;

“we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on.” (Google Blog)

Search engine optimisation is the art of optimising a website for terms that a website’s target market are searching for in order to rank more highly on search engines for those particular keywords.
Despite what SEO companies might like to tell you, SEO is not some dark art, clouded in secrecy. Much, if not everything someone will need to do to optimise their website is available on the internet. However, when search engine optimisation is implemented properly it is a very time consuming and labour intensive process.