Search Engine Optimisation - Going Over The Basics

SEO is short for search engine optimisation and is a term used by webmasters who wish to improve their visibility in the search engines. Before getting into more detail some people may not be aware of what a search engine is. They are websites that essentially get most of/a huge majority of the pages on the web and sorts them in order of relevancy depending on what keywords people search for. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos and Ask Jeeves are all search engines and if it was not for them you would not be able to find most things on the web today. Without these there are very limited ways of finding new sites, you could simply guess the URL, but that could take ages and it is not very particle.

Now we have established what search engines are we will talk about how they can help you. They are the most popular method people use to surf the web for new sites, so imagine then how many people use them? If you had a site you was able to get a top position on the search engines for a key phrase that is searched alot then alot of these people would find your website.

The more visitors that come to your site the more money you will make, the more money you make the more successful your business is. Let's face it if you are not in Google then no one is visiting your site, unless you have tons of money for advertising campaigns. Infact getting in the top of Google will save you a hell of a lot of money as the traffic that comes to your site will be free! If you are not in the search engines then you are missing out on serious traffic and your business could fail because of this, because let's face it you need traffic for your business to thrive.

How do I achieve these rankings? Google and the other search engines need to provide the most relevant pages for the terms that are being searched. No one wants to see a website about cats if they did a search for "selling your home"

For Google to do this they have an algorithm that they implement. This determines the most relevant sites first. This relies on rankings factors. A few of them are: is the searched keywords mentioned on your site? If not then Google will think that your site is not relevant to that term and will not rank you for them. Backlinks to your site is another factor. Google and the other search engines use sites that link to your site as a kind of voting system. They believe that if someone links to your site then it must be good, why else would they link to it? There are many other ranking factors, these are just a few. Also, it is not as simple as getting a link from every site that you come across. As links can be gathered easily through spammy forums, FFA links, blog posts and other sources the search engines have evolved and not each link is treated equally.

As SEO can be broke into two categories, "blackhat" and whitehat" there are many companies out there and not everyone does SEO in a way that will help rank your site. Infact, some SEOs will get your site banned and penalised by the major search engines. All search engines have guidelines that you must follow and some SEOs do not follow these guidelines. They do things that may rank you quicker but will harm your site in the long run.

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Overall, search engine optimisation is defiantly worth thinking about. For more information please visit why use nofollow and seo advice, were more free SEO advice is waiting.