What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

You have probably heard of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others. These are the big players in the search engine business and millions upon millions of people use them every day to find everything from stock tips to sports cars. Google alone boasts over 200 million searches every day, and that number keeps on growing. Even if you have never thought about search engines before, these statistics illustrate how important it is for your website to be listed in them. But being listed is not enough; you also need to achieve a high ranking in the search results to benefit from the considerable amount of traffic they can send to your website.

Have you ever wondered why some sites turn up at the top of any given search result while others are buried 10, 20 or 100 pages down?

Search engine optimisation or positioning is the process of making a website appeal to both search engines and potential customers. A well optimised website will appear in the first few results of a search on any of the major search engines for the popular search terms and phrases that a potential customer would use to find the services or products offered.

The ranking a search engine allocates a website for a particular term or phrase, is dependant on how important it perceives the site to be for that term. This perception is based on several factors – how easily the search engine can assess the website
(in other words the coding), the content on the site and the popularity of the site.

By optimising your website we allow search engines to assess the information easily, thereby improving your website’s visibility.