Search Engine Success using Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the business of preparing a web site to do well in the search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tends to be regarded as an afterthought for most web sites with visual design coming top on most priority lists, then content then... and so on. This is not the best approach if you want your web site to reach its full potential with high rankings in the search engines for free. You should design your web site to work well in the search engines from the off.

There is a lot of competition for the top prize - a page one listing on a search engine - so the challenge can be significant.

However most web sites are not designed specifically to work well in search engines so you can be successful.

Rule number one - You must start with good quality content.

Good quality content means useful, well crafted text that your human web site visitors want to read. A good quantity of useful content is better than a small amount. The content must be primarily written for the human web site visitor with slight amendments to help the automated search engine spiders. You can read more advice on providing good content here at www.epsilis.co.uk.

Don't hinder the search engines with your website design.

There are also a variety of techniques that need to be applied to the website design to maximise the web sites potential and a number of widely used website design techniques that will hinder the web sites rankings in search engines.

So the basic steps are

This site includes a series of guides to help you go through the steps involved.

But it doesn't stop there - Search Engine Optimisation is not a one off task.

It takes a good length of time to build up a good presence on the internet and therefore on the search engines - perhaps 12 months. This usually means regular effort:

Link building is considered to be a very important activity in any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

Some search engines (notably Google) now consider that the number of relevant links to a web site is a key measure of the importance (and therefore how high they rank) that website. Note the use of the term "relevant links". The web sites linking to your website should contain content that is relevant and complementary to your web site. The old link farms with thousands of unassociated links are not considered as valid. You can find more information on link popularity and link building techniques here.

There are 2 basic types of search engine - crawlers and edited directories

The crawlers who regularly send out spiders (or robots - programs that crawl around the internet following links and indexing pages) and the human reviewed or edited directories. The crawlers are likely to pick up your website automatically, the human reviewed directories will not index your website unless they are asked to. You can find more about the different types of search engine here.