Search engine optimisation and web design are fields that are as full of controversy as they are full of practitioners. But there are no ready-made solutions or easy fixes, as anyone truly in the knowledge will tell you. Internet Image is a UK based company that has been making rapid progress in all fields of internet marketing of late and it is interesting to look at their approach to online marketing to see what is making them a success.

According to Internet Image, the one (and very simple) technique for achievement in this field is probably the most old-fashioned of all business practices: good, old-fashioned hard work. This really is an area where the new ideas and technologies tend to gain prominence at a remarkable rate, but as a result, sensible techniques can sometimes get left behind. As Richard Bowles (CEO of Internet Image) puts it "it seems like every internet optimisation company comes along with some great and fabulous idea of how to outfox search engines, but they all miss the basic point. Search engines want to keep their customers happy and the only way they can do this is by delivering proper content. 100% correct content, 100% of the time. So the answer to search engine optimisation is a simple combination – make sure your site is relevant, and work damned hard to let the world know about it. If your site sells pianos, then any company that promises to get you to number one in Google with a search for bicycles is going to get you into trouble, one way or the other, sooner or later". It really is that simple. If you believe you have a product that the market wants, and it’s a popular one, you are part way there. A company like Internet Image can make the rest of the steps for you.

Companies like Internet Image obviously make their living out of designing websites and promoting them, so they are highly unlikely to reveal all of their secrets. However, the staff at Internet Image seem far more forthcoming than most. According to them, the days of ‘back hat’ techniques are (quite rightly) dead and buried. Black hat methods involved ways of fooling search engines into giving a site much higher prominence than it really deserved. Internet Image say that they know all these methods, but the fact they have never used them is why ‘their’ sites always achieve consistent results. Says Richard, "black hatting might get you to Google page one, position one, but it’ll never, ever, keep you there and when you go down, you’ll go a very, very long way down. And damned fast too".

The opposite technique is known, not surprisingly, as ‘white hat’ optimisation. This follows two consecutive paths; on-site and off-site optimisation. On-site work means ensuring that the content, ’tags’, images, text and code of any site is the way search engines like it. Off-site work consists of driving internet users to the site in question from various external sources. Internet Image seems to have got the balance just about right, judging by the results it’s shown for its clients so far.

In the opinion of all the staff at Internet Image, the web is just simply growing up. A few years ago, search engines were like young children; show them a pretty unremarkable advert and they’d rush out and buy the product. But as advertisers got more and more sophisticated, so did the search engines. These days, it’s nowhere near as simple. To survive, search engines need to give their customers what they want. This means that the programming behind something like Google, needs to be incredibly sophisticated. And it is!