A Google consultant is a person or company specializing in search engine optimization (SEO) for the Google search engine.

Because Google is the most widely used internet search engine the commercial importance of achieving a good page rank on Google has grown hugely for many companies - particularly those businesses that rely on internet marketing to attract visitors or customers to their websites.

While it is possible for companies to buy position on Google using the Google AdWords system the results tend not to be regarded by those conducting the search as particularly authentic or as unbiased as the page rankings. Also popular words can get very expensive to buy.

As Google's popularity increased companies tried improving their rankings first by using Google bombing in which they created many different sites all linked to one another through a particular word. This gave the site a high ranking when the word was searched for. This "abuse" threatened the utility of Google as a search engine so Google responded by adapting its top secret web crawler technologies and ranking algorithms.

In turn SEO consultants tried to reverse engineer the Google technology in order to gain advantage in the page rankings. So started a struggle between Google and SEO consultants.

As it became more and more difficult to trick the Google system - so the Google consultants became more and more specialised in their work to improve the Google rankings of their clients (eventually to the point where they don't work on any other search engine). The careful use of copywriting, linking strategies and the frequency and timing of updated content can all help move sites up the rankings; the closer a site is to the top of the first page of results delivered by Google the more likely it is that the person searching will click on the link.

The boom in popularity of personal Blogs and Blogging has impacted on the way sites are ranked too and is reflected in the purchase of blogger.com by Google Inc

Google and the Google Consultants have more or less reached a Détente where Google gives a certain amount of advice to Google Consultants on how best to edit or engineer webpages to allow them to be indexed properly. However since Google is now listed on NASDAQ and its commercial success depends to a great extent on selling AdWords by auction it remains to be seen if the symbiotic relationship between Google and the Google Consultants will survive.

See also

• Search engine optimization
• Google

External links

• www.google.com
• Search Google for "Google consultant".