Google unveiled the South African branch of its Engage programme yesterday, in Johannesburg.
Google Engage, a partner programme search engine optimisation (SEO) service, promotes the enabling of small to medium businesses (SMBs).
As a company “committed to the success of SA's digital economy”, Google aims to empower professionals to better manage their content through the Google AdWords service, it says. Google Engage is open both to freelancers and companies, and is completely free.
By enabling local ventures' access to SEO information, Google also manages to promote “white-hat” SEO methods. These techniques include optimised Web site design and use of content-specific keywords that result in what is known as “organic” traffic.
Techniques that are discouraged by search engines and involve exploiting the indexing system are known as “black-hat” methods.
Sites that employ these often have pages that have keywords relating to an immense number of topics that contain little to no relevant information. They achieve this through a process known as “cloaking”, through which they provide search engine queries with content that seems to match the request perfectly, while actually containing nothing relevant.
While “black-hat” techniques provide the site utilising them with valuable traffic, they don't offer any benefit to the search engine user, which results in these sites being removed from search results.
Economic advantages
Organic traffic (received through relevance and appropriate optimisation methods) can provide a good source of hits and revenue for companies. This means it is important for SMBs to have SEO measures in place if they wish to increase their traffic and make the most of their online environment.
However, search engines make no revenue from organic traffic, relying on paid-for prominence.
This, combined with the frequently changing algorithms used by search engines, means traffic and referrals are by no means guaranteed.
Organisations that would suffer significant losses were they to lose their traffic often invest in “paid-for prominence”, appearing as “sponsored links”, as a result.
Google Engage has been successfully launched in 19 different countries, and aims to take on approximately 250 South African users a year.
Share