Online marketing is a growing business as more companies turn to offering services and products on the net. For many companies this is a cost effective way to stay ahead of the competition, especially when compared with other methods of advertising and marketing. We take a look at search engine optimisation and what it means to the success of a business online.

Strictly speaking, a website is the formal address and official location of a business in the web. It is the place where products are presented in detail and where customers normally make purchases using a credit card or other online payment schemes. A website is also one of the marketing tools that a business can use online.

Every SEO knows the best way to the top of Google is by creating optimised links. Links are the main factor on deciding where a site ranks within Google, however getting those links in an ethical manner can be slightly tricky.

Getting involved in social media is a great way to drive instant traffic to your site, however if you want your blog to grow into a traffic magnet, you are going to need to attract attention from the search engines.

I think it is pretty much common knowledge that the older your domain the stronger chances it has of ranking in Google for a specific search term. Many talk about the sandbox effect which basically suggests a site will be deliberately blocked from ranking highly on Google because the domain is too new.

One of the most fundamental ways to drive links to your site is by creating quality content; it follows the webmasters favourite line 'content is king'. This statement is true but only to a certain degree as no one is going to link to your quality content unless they know it's there.

To understand how to best optimise your site for Google you need to understand how the web's link graph works and how Google places value on a particular site.

SEO is a delicate balance between on page optimisation and off site popularity. One way of quickly increasing your Google ranking is to build effective links back to your pages, a long debated subject is the effectiveness of reciprocal links.

Working in the SEO industry it is not uncommon to receive reciprocal link requests. Please link to me using the below details and I will send you a link back. These are the kind of generic emails that I open on a daily basis; remarkably some of the requests come from other SEO companies.

When it comes to building links to your sites, many webmasters will think that a link from a high page rank site is the ultimate acquisition. The problem is, even if you get a high page rank link it is not guaranteed to give you the result you want or need.