SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

As its name suggests, SEO is the process of optimizing a website so that it ranks high in search engines. In an ideal world, your ‘all singing all dancing’ website should be up there in the top 10 when a surfer types in one of your keywords into his search engine. If you’re down at the bottom, worse still if you’re not even on the first page, chances are the surfer, with his short attention span, will surf on by.

Search engines want to provide their users with a valuable service, so the user instantly finds results relevant to his search. So when you launch your website, these search engines use a sophisticated and automative system of algorithms to determine rankings, and they’re changing them all the time. That’s why it’s essential to have a quality website with all the relevant keywords linked to it to attract visitors from the off!

There are two important components related to this system, and which determine your ranking:

7. Links

8. Content

If you have a quality website, in theory it should attract regular visitors, and this will show up on the search engines. In addition, if you get good links from other websites, this too will show up, and overall, will improve your rankings.

Patience is the watchword when it comes to search engines.  Whilst they are remarkably sophisticated, they have their work cut out to keep up with demand.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites and blogs being added every day, and all requiring the 'once over' before they go live.  Even the big hitting search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, take time to crawl your website, so it could be days, even weeks, before you're picked up and dumped at the bottom of their rankings.

Anything that attracts your website to the search engines is the way forward, and even the slightest alterations or additions can help.  That's why links are so important, as this generates traffic which in turn is picked up.

Finally, whether it's a website or blog, content is king.  Regular refreshing is essential to hold the interest of the search engines, so a tweak here or there, or simply adding new content, even a line or two, will keep you in the frame, and with perseverance, you will move up the rankings, and with luck and application, you will reach the Holy Grail of the first page.