Free Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

There are three main areas to address when thinking about search engine optimisation

• The first is the construction of the site itself
• The second is establsihing a presence for your site on the internet
• The third is the difference between natural search and pay-per-click and where each one fits into your strategy

How do search engines work?

Before we look at anything specific it's worth saying a couple of things about how search engines work and in particular Google since it the single biggest search facility in the world, currently considered responsible for over 70% of all searches.

When we talk about search engine placement there are two kinds, natural and pay-per-click. We'll talk about these later and how they work (if you want to skip ahead just click here)

Google is an automated process. Although you can submit your site to Google for inclusion it also discovers sites on its own via a huge network of bots (search programmes) that constantly trawl the internet following every link they can find and reporting back.

Although it is an automated process, the basic principle of Google is to judge a site as much as possible on what it thinks someone would see if they visited. So it looks at what elements of the page are intended to catch the eye, which elements may be intended to deceive and makes a value judgement about the content.

The simplest advice we can give anyone about optimising their site is to be honest. You can weight the dice in your favour by making the site as relevant to your products as possible but only by working with search engines can you build long-term equity in your site and gain a respectable place at the top of the search engines.

The other thing to remember is that are no immediate fixes to natural search optimisation.

Back to the three areas we discussed above. Let's look at each of these in turn