Successful search engine optimisation

While trying to learn something about Search Engine Optimisation, I had a customer that wanted their website promoting.
This was great as it gave me the opportunity to hone my skills while earning a little bit of money from it. This opportunity would hopefully allow me to get some experience and reputation to say that our company can now offer successful search engine optimisation and a solid online marketing plan for other small businesses that want to raise their web presence.

My task:
The main search engines to optimise for were the main 3 for the UK and .COM so that was:
www.google.com
www.google.co.uk
www.yahoo.com
www.yaho.co.uk
www.msn.com
www.msn.co.uk

and I was optimising mainly for the following 3 search terms:
CIM, CMI, ISMM
With a view to secondary optimisation for the following search terms:
marketing course, Marketing qualification, Marketing course London, CIM Course, CIM London, and CIM qualification


I think I have come into this at the right time because things are changing, especially with Google. They have released a lot more tools recently to help people like me to monitor, test and plan my Search Engine Optimisation strategy. These tools are Webmasters tools including sitemaps, and Google Analytics.
Last year they changed the way that they were going to index the internet. It was becoming more apparent that they weren’t going to be able to hold everything public that is on the net, so they had to think about dropping old content, and keeping the useful stuff. This was the ‘BIG DADDY’ update and it showed a way forward that they are aiming to stop tricksters from pushing their search results to the top using lazy methods.
More recently (well currently) from January to March 2007 they are making more updates to their search spiders and they are totally changing the way in which it works. There is a lot of speculation now about the way in which this will work, and people are keeping an eye on what Matt Cutts has got to say on the issue, but it looks like it will be another step to stop quick fix methods and to reward people who have put in the legwork.

Anyway, Since the start of the year and trying this out, I have been keeping records of search positions for certain words for my customer’s company, and I am proud to say that I have jumped him in the search results from around 150th in the list now up to 7th so they are now on the first page.
I am proud of my efforts because it means that I was working on the right tracks, and I believe that I know what to do as well as what to steer clear of in future.
I will now be advertising that we can help with Search Engine Optimisation as one of our skills on our company website.

Regards,

Lindsay.