Search Engines

A Search Engine Truth

While a high ranking is essential, only websites which contain quality content will ultimately be successful. Many will have reached elevated rankings without promotion.

Beware the 'We will Submit your website to 3,000 Search Engines' routine. Search engines know these tricks and penalise them as they do the 'We increase your traffic 1000%' schemes. Similarly, paid backlinking from other websites to yours is also penalized.

Backlinking (inbound/reciprocal links) is not vital to a website's success in SA. Google's logic is that websites with backlinks must be important and therefore deserve higher ranking.

A Search Engine Myth

Google is by far and away the most popular search engine at the moment but it ignores META tags that are so vocally recommended by some designers. Our web design primer tells you more.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines use 'spiders' - robot code that trawls the Internet indexing millions of web pages and extracting from them keywords/phrases that visitors might possibly use to find them.

Any Guarantees of Numero Uno?

None - unless you're prepared to spend R50,000 monthly. A web maintenance contract with Warthog includes regular inspections of your website's position, competition's keywords and action to improve your ranking.