The aim of search engine optimisation is to ensure your site is fully integrated with the Internet and easily locatable in the ‘shallows’, or searchable portion, of the Internet. This ensures your site’s content is available to a much wider audience.

As search technology has developed and matured, rough guidelines have emerged as to how websites should be set up in order to function to the highest achievable level in relation to the rest of the Internet.

In effect, the search engines themselves dictate the kinds of websites they wish to list, and rank highly to be most relevant for their customers needs. They also dictate the kinds of practices they do not wish to see and will penalise infractions, in some cases quite heavily.

Whatever your site’s purpose and your businesses focus, providing an informative, easily navigable and well regarded website is critical to attaining the highest search engine listings. Once you cover the first two points effectively the latter should follow naturally.

The information your web site provides to visitors is effectively the coin with which you purchase high placement in natural search engine listings, and thereby advertise your site.

The web page that presents the most relevant information should gain the top listings and the most visitors, and from there you can continue to present your services and products. For example if an Internet user types a search query for “Walking Boots” the first results will contain the most information about walking boots – what to look for when buying a pair of walking boots, how to care for them, product details, etc. Whilst some of the early results are from rambling and outdoor activities organisations, the majority of results on the first results page are from outdoor supplies shops.

The first step to creating an information-rich site is to find out what people are searching for with regard your industry, and which keywords and phrases they are using to search. This means you can tailor the information you provide to answer those needs more effectively.

Creating great content can be the hardest part of optimising your site, but with a list of relevant keywords to suggest topics and advise what information people want to see, this can be made easier.

Once you’ve written some great content, you must present it in the most accessible means possible, to give you an edge on other sites offering similar information. This means ensuring your site structure is set up to be compatible with search engines, and easy to navigate.

Many sites are set up in formats that cannot be read by search engines, the content is effectively illegible or non-existent to the search engines. The site navigation is important to ensure that search engines can read, and rank, your entire site, not just the front page. This ensures your site is search engine compatible.

Once you have written great content, made your sites structure easy to navigate and made your site easy to locate via the search engines, you can look at your individual pages in more detail. There are many different elements that make up a web page. Each must be focused on the main keyword/s you wish to achieve higher listings on for that page. Broadly speaking page optimisation can be split into: optimisation of your page coding; optimisation of the keyword density (frequency with which the keyword appears in the text) and optimisation of the contextual links (links within body text to other information) and the text surrounding them.

The search engines also rate your site on how well regarded your site is in the online community. To determine this they measure your ‘link popularity’ based on: how many links into your site there are; what these links say about you; how relevant to your sites content they are; and how highly rated the site is, that is linking to you. The sites you choose to link to, are also taken into consideration. Off site optimisation aims to address these issues.