Introduction.

Search Engine Optimisation - SEO - is the term applied to the most common method to ensure the effective internet marketing of your website. Having produced a website you’ll obviously want people to visit it. Whether it’s because you want to inform people about something for entirely altruistic reasons or sell them something; if no one knows your website’s out there - how can they visit it? Whilst there are various ways you could set about publicising your website, Search Engine Optimisation is by far the most cost effective and probably the easiest way to market a website on the internet.

What does Search Engine Optimisation do?

Quite simply SEO optimises the possibility of your website being on the first few, if not the first one or two, pages of websites returned by a query entered into a search engine. In essence this means ensuring that when anyone enters a query into a search engine and that query relates to something in your website - the search engine considers your website to be an ‘important’ one on that queries subject matter. In so doing the search engine will rank, or position, your websites URL (Universal Resource Locator or website address) high up in the list of websites it returns. Some SEO techniques can be employed by website owners themselves or you can hire someone to do a truly professional search engine optimisation for you. The following provides an outline of some of the things involved in producing a website that is ‘search engine optimised’.

Linking with other websites.

One of the many different techniques that can be employed in Search Engine Optimisation is premised on the following point. Search engines think that a website that has lots of links to it from other websites ‘must’ be an important/popular one. So, if you enter into reciprocal arrangements with other websites - they will have links meaning that your website is in effect being marketed over the internet by another. The more important/bigger/cooler the other websites with your link on it are - the better the linking will work for you as an internet marketing tool.

Listing your websites URL with search engines.

The idea of giving search engines some information about your website, in order to help it find your website in response to a search engine query, might seem totally obvious. However, the process can be time consuming and subsequently many website owners haven’t done so. Part of the problem is different search engines carry out their searches according to varying criteria, which further complicates the process. For a relatively small amount of money it can be a good idea to pay a ‘submission agent’ to do this task for you. They will often register your website with up to 100 search engines, some of which you’ll probably be unaware that they even exist.

Intelligent URLs.

Improving your websites Search Engine Optimisation by using intelligent URLs is another obvious and relatively easy task to carry out. For example; if someone has a website - fruit.com - that is to do with - yes that’s correct fruit! Which would be the more ‘intelligent’ URL for a page that is all about oranges: www.fruit.com/page4.html - OR - www.fruit.com/oranges.html
ie. Make webpage URLs relevant to the topic of the page.

Meta tags.

The intelligent use of meta tags in a webpage can be a very powerful method of ensuring your website is optimised in terms of search engine rankings. Along with ‘meta tags’ - is the appropriate use of the ‘title’ element of a webpage. The ‘title’ element works similarly to the idea of ‘intelligent URLs’. ie. Rather than giving a webpage a title of, say, Page 4 - make it appropriate to the content of the page, eg. Use the page title 'Oranges' - for a website about different fruits. Meta tags are analogous to ‘taglines’ in an advertising campaign. Along with the ‘title’ of a webpage search engines use meta tag descriptions and, to a lesser extent, keywords as a quick reference point for what’s inside a webpage. Using terms that you anticipate people will be searching the internet for in meta tag description and keywords will greatly improve the search engine ranking of your website. An important point here, in terms of internet marketing, is to make sure your meta tag description reflects the ‘title’ element that you have given the webpage. Don’t forget as well that something as simple as thoughtfully using the ‘alt’ attribute in an ‘img’ element will also help search engines to find website.

And finally …..

To increase the chances of people bookmarking and returning to your website; having optimised it you’ll need to keep people interested in the content of your web pages. Poorly written material in your website will inevitably mean readers will doubt the validity and veracity of it, or worse quickly become bored by it. Hiring a professional writer to either edit or write text and articles for you is to be highly recommended.