Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a much-hyped term that fundamentally means that websites are set up in such a way to give them the best chance of being found by search engines. This broad outline discusses some of the ways that this can be done for free. (If you engage us to set up or maintain your website, this sort of work will be included).

There are basically three ways that people can become aware of your website:

1. Somebody tells them about it and gives them the address; they enter that address directly into their web browser
2. They follow a link to your site from someone else's site
3. They find your site listed in a search site, such as Yahoo! Or Google

For 1, include the name of your site on all advertising, e.g. business cards, company literature, mailing contacts, yellow pages, etc, etc.

For 2, contact other people with websites (especially topic-related websites) and offer to have a reciprocal link (i.e. they have a link to yours, and you have a link to theirs).

For 3, it is important to get the site visible on search engines. Examples are Google, Yahoo!, Altavista, Askjeeves, Lycos.

These sites are basically huge databases that attempt to catalogue as many pages on the Internet as possible. They use automated processing to build the databases, though some emphasize quality by having each listing checked by a human. Others rely on programs called robots, spiders or crawlers to roam around the Internet hunting for new pages to index.

As the spiders constantly add to the database another program, called a search engine, processes requests from people who are looking for web pages on specific topics. The search engine looks in the database for pages that contain the key words or phrases that someone is looking for and sends that person a list of all the pages that contain those terms.

If you want people to find your pages, it is highly recommended that you submit a request to each of the major search engines to index your pages. Each of these sites has a form for you to fill in with the address, a description and sometimes a category.

You cannot guarantee to be number one on a search results list! If you could, wouldn't everyone?
But you can get high.

Each search engine uses a slightly different method for determining which pages are likely to be most relevant and should therefore be near the top. Though there are differences, there are many similarities. The following list includes almost everything a search engine will consider:

• Do the keywords appear in the "title" tag of the page?
• Do the keywords appear in the first few lines of the page?
• How many times do the keywords appear in the entire page?
• Do the keywords appear in a "meta /" tag in the page?
• How many other pages in the search engine database link to the page?
• How many times have people chosen this page from a previous search list result?
• Is the page rated highly in a human-generated directory?

Clearly the most important thing is the location of key words or phrases in the page. Overindulgence in this or multiple repetitions is called spamming and this can be detected by most search engines.

Keywords

Once you have got a site that looks the way you wanit it to, you need to choose keywords and made your site visible and readable to the search engines. This means choosing the right keywords and making sure that your page title, meta tags and first paragraph highlight those keywords. It is easy to get this wrong. The wrong keywords are chosen because not enough time is spent thinking about how people are going to try to find your website.

More to come...