SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the skill of ensuring that a website appears high in the rankings for a chosen search term. The creation of a website is only the first step in publicising a business on the internet, because the chances of anyone finding it among four billion others is fairly remote.

Whether or not your business could benefit from search engine optimisation is, of course, entirely up to you. We have therefore included the following notes to help you with your decision.

What would be your reaction if a business colleague told you that he or she had spent a great deal of money in printing thousands of new brochures, but had then put them away in a cupboard ? Obviously nobody would do such a thing, but the internet has produced an almost similar situation.

There are two very distinct steps to consider, having taking the decision to put your business on the web.

•       Firstly getting a website, i.e. printing the brochures
•       Secondly deciding how you are going to let people know of its existence.

We are all aware of businesses that have gone to the expense of creating a new website, but presumably are not yet aware of the second step, and have therefore become one of life's great business secrets, admittedly by neglect rather than by design.

How can your business benefit from SEO?

If you do not want your website to be one of these business secrets, and your potential market is, for example, one million inhabitants, then there are three things you can do.
The first is to spend vast amounts of money on advertising, to try to contact some of the million.

• The second is to try SEO yourself.
• The third is to use a ranking specialist, who will try to get your website up the search engine listings.

For those who wish to have a go themselves, we are happy to provide free inside information on how to go about it.

• The sole purpose of SEO is to ensure that a client´s website appears on the front page of search engines, for the search terms that are applicable to that business.

• Google changes its ranking list regularly, and the job of a specialist is to make sure that, when each new list appears, their clients are up there once again.

• Although users of Google have the option to decide how many are listed on the first page, we assume that the user has left it as the default of 10, when we talk about first page.

Initially there was little competition and it was a simple task to appear at the top of a search engine. Now that there are billions of competing web pages the job requires much more knowledge and skill. Many of the previous SEO people have disappeared, and a new breed has come on the scene. A big change in the anti-spam detection system by Google, has meant that many sites have simply disappeared from the listings.

Some sites that appear for brief periods at the top of the lists have done so by cheating. Quite naturally the specialists who have a client's site that has been displaced by such a site, object to this, and contact the search engines to have that site removed.

The search engines either then remove the offending site, or even block that server. At a search engine conference it was stated that over 20 million of 30 million servers are currently blocked. This is extremely unfortunate for all the other clients that are on that shared server, as they now cannot be found in search engines.

Firstly, it depends a great deal on how your competition achieved their position in the rankings. If every single one of your competition are in the top ten as a result of "off page factors", in other words links and anchor text, it could be a quite some time while a specialist works on building up your links.

Secondly, in view of the way that the Google ranking system works, it can be a while before the results appear. This depends on how quickly the little detective from Google, called a bot, takes to find the various pages of your site, and put them in its index.

We all then wait for the next shuffle of the billions of pages into a new ranking order.

It is rare that results will show quickly, although it does happen occasionally.

If your website has only 3 other competitors in the world for your chosen search term, then without doing any work at all, by definition your site will be No.4, if it is listed by Google. If there happen to be 15,000 or 150,000 competing with you, then that is where you will be on the list.

If you click the word boat below, you will find that there are many millions of competing web pages in Google. Then click the search epoxy mandarin toasters, and you can see that, if that is the business you are trying to promote, you do not need to be a rocket scientist to work out that your site will be on the first page of Google without doing anything.

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It would also be unfair for anyone to charge you for achieving this automatic search engine listing of No.3 and last. The value of SEO is to achieve a high ranking when competing against substantial odds. This competition comes either from a vast number of competing sites, or the fact that, although there might not be millions of competitors, many are using a specialist.

Quite simply, search engine ranking is a constant competition between a considerable number of specialists, as to who comes top in the examinations, and in this business, the exams come round all too often.

1. Site Structure: Creating a simple site structure that a spider can easily understand and follow.

2. Page Content: Ensuring that there is plenty of good quality content on the page. This is not only of value to the visitor, but also in persuading other webmasters to give you a link.

3. Links: Working hard on acquiring links from relevant pages.