Use SEO If You Want to Be More Than So-So

You may have regular customers who return to your website again and again. But most new traffic, and new customers reaching you via the Internet, will be generated from search engine enquiries.

Typically potential visitors will type in a key phrase or search term to the likes of Google, Yahoo, or Ask Jeeves. This will bring up access to relevant websites - often millions contained in hundreds of pages. Most people will not look further than the first page or two, often no further than the top ten listings.

These positions are highly prized and websites compete as best they can to gain first page listings for key phrases that will bring them business. Generally they do this by advertising, either through pay per click campaigns with the search engines themselves and/or by search engine optimisation (SEO).

The latter involves use of a variety of techniques to get websites taken more notice of by search engines.

Major search engines are able to react so quickly to key word enquiries because they have created their own databases. Major search engines such as Google do this automatically by 'crawling' the Internet, indexing the results within their databases.

When a keyword or phrase is entered by a search engine user, the search engine is interrogated for matches and response pages are created. The ranking of websites within those pages is determined by the search engine's internal algorithms - effectively ranking software that calls on closely guarded formulae to decide the relevance of each website to the enquiry.

Factors looked at are likely to include meta tags on the target website, the frequency of the key word sought (key word density) within text, visitorship and backlinks from other websites.

Not all backlinks count in favour of a high ranking. In general they should not be commercial, paid for, links and must be from other websites with relevant content. Also, the higher the ranking attributed to the website by the search engine, the greater the value that is given to the backlink.

Search engine optimisation involves making sure websites are indexed by search engines, that they are 'crawler friendly' so that the maximum information possible is picked up and indexed, that meta tags and textual content reflect the keywords and phrases most likely to bring targeted visitors, and, importantly, that there are sufficient quality backlinks in place to ensure search engine recognition.

The Internet is dynamic and does not stay still for a millisecond. New websites are launched all the time and new content added to existing websites. Visitorship ebbs and flows and backlinks are created. Search engines do not stay still either. Their databases are constantly updated while algorithms are revised and updated to reflect changing conditions.

This means that just like advertising and promotion, to be effective search engine optimisation cannot be a one-off activity but should be a continuing investment. But if undertaken with skill and dedication, SEO is cost effective (usually more so than pay per click campaigns) and, with growing competition for those high page rankings, a necessity for any commercial website.