How I First Came To Understand Seo And How It Continually Improves The Sales From My Websites

There is to a large degree a lot of Webmasters that have not studied or even heard of the subject which, in case you're one of them, it is basically a technique to get your web pages ranked high on search engines.

The first time one of my businesses ideally required high volumes of Internet customers, was when I bought my holiday cottage in Whitby, North Yorkshire. The cottage cost me a little under 200,000 uk pounds in 2007 and unfortunately to acquire the property, I also had to acquire a large mortgage! Okay I love Whitby and I use the cottage myself but it was primarily a business as unfortunately I am not personally on the UK rich list. I needed to obtain as many holiday bookings as possible to pay the mortgage.

I started off with Google AdWords, which is an excellent and immediate service, but long-term it is expensive, if that's your main way of attracting customers to your website.

At this point I can jump forward in time and honestly report that the end results of my applied SEO studies and efforts towards my website for the holiday cottage resulted in virtually 100% bookings all year round and entirely from the Internet. This is because Endeavour Cottage is very near the top of most search engine rankings, including Google, for all the relevant keywords like, Whitby Holiday Cottage.

Okay that's great for me, but the thing that blows my mind is why the majority of people with businesses that have a website, and often also high overheads, don't seem to place the same importance on getting customers reading their web pages as I do?

You only have to look on the Internet under that holiday accommodation category to find there are many holiday cottages, guesthouses, hotels (with often attractive websites) that are well-designed, but they have applied no SEO. Therefore their website will be way back in the search engine rankings with extremely few visiting customers from the Internet.

Okay some people might think that this lacking occupancy of holiday accommodation could be because at the time of writing (August 2009), we are in the middle of the worst recession for many years, but I don't think that's the case. It is certainly not for my cottage and a few other well promoted cottages I've noted. There as been plenty of evidence on the news that people are holidaying in Britain more than usual, mainly due to the weak performance of the pound against the euro, coupled with the fact that they are going for short holidays closer to home. Probably to a degree, businesses are struggling because of the catch 22 situation of less money equals less marketing, equals less customers, equals less money. But I truly believe that -if they invested a little money into their websites, especially on SEO, the returns would far outweigh the costs.

I can personally confirm this with my own various business websites and especially with my own holiday cottage website. The cottage is priced very fairly in my opinion, and, thankfully, my customers opinions, according to the guestbook. But there are a lot of similar cottages to my own which are priced just as fairly, which are very low on bookings. This is literally losing them hundreds of pounds per week and, taken across the year, this equals thousands of pounds!

So if your website is important to you, learn SEO ASAP or get a trustworthy expert to undertake the work for you.