Search Engine Optimisation (sometimes referred to as SEO) should, perhaps more accurately, be called Web Site Optimisation or Marketing your site to Search Engines.  Whatever you choose to call it, search engine optimisation is the technique of making changes to the code of your web site, both visible and invisible, in order to achieve a high ranking for your site in Search Engines and Directories.
But hold on – isn’t this cheating?
. . . . surely we’re talking about using trickery to secure an advantage over our competitors.  We’re trying to ensure that when a potential visitor searches on a search engine using keywords that relate to our site, our site is listed in a more prominent position encouraging searchers to click on our link.
Well of course we’re trying to gain a competitive advantage…
Except that there are no tricks, no gimmicks, no cheats!
. . . . just simple, common sense sales & marketing techniques, after all you use them all the time in advertising, brochures, letters, why not use them to achieve the same results with your website?  It’s the whole basis on which search engines work – as a user of a search engine, you’re looking for concise, informative, up-to-date content that’s relevant to your enquiry.  Deliver that on your web site, serve it up in a way that emphasises its true value to the search engines and you’ll get high rankings on the major search engines – try to cheat them and you’ll ultimately get blocked and lose a potential audience of millions per day.

Search engine optimisation involves tailoring both the human-visible content and the machine-readable code on each page to make it relevant (in search engine terms as well as human terms) to the keywords chosen as targets for the page in question.  In other words, when someone uses a search engine to search for the keywords that we are targeting, we want our site to appear as the first choice or very close to it.

You might wonder if it’s worth all the effort to get your site a high search engine ranking; well here a few statistics to put search engine optimisation into perspective..

1. The top 9 or 10 search engines account for most of the 300 million plus search requests each day.

2. Over 85% of all web surfing sessions begin with a visit to one of the major search engines.

3. Less than 2% of all websites worldwide have been optimised for search engines.

I’ll let you be the judge of whether it's worth the effort . . . . .

Now you've got some basic knowledge of what search engine optimisation is, read about the optimisation process.

Copyright © February 2004