March 4th, 2010 by Nick

SEO is a truly modern business strategy, and has a become an integral part of how the net functions, you might say that SEO as a discipline has begun to shape the internet – but what exactly is it, and how best is it utilized?

I’m sure you’re aware of this, but SEO stands for search engine optimization – this is admittedly a bit of an ambiguous phrase that is perhaps responsible for SEO’s mistaken associations with spam and mal-practice – in fact white hat or ethical optimisation is not only welcomed by Google, but they even offer a variety of tools to maximize its usage!

It is perhaps a good idea to try and narrow down the fairly broad idea of search engine optimisation; simply the aim of SEO is to try and increase a page’s ranking in a search engine, probably Google and this can be done via a fairly simple process – however, whilst the essential process might be simple, the more commitment (and money!) you invest in optimization the more effective its going to be.

Optimization essentially is a two pronged process, and involves on page and off page activity, i.e. on the one hand you will engineer your website to attract Google’s ‘bots’ (which are the automated spiders that scan your page) into thinking that your website is highly relevant to a specific targeted keyword – so for example, if your sell novelty oversized sombreros, you should try and include the words “novelty oversized sombreros” somewhere on your page a few times, then when a user types “novelty oversized sombreros” into Google you’ll stand a good chance of appearing near or at the top of the page!

Sounds pretty simple? – well its not quite, as Google want to ensure that their prominent pages are as high quality as possible (which is fair enough) and that is why you shouldn’t only focus on keyword density, but should aim for high quality content – remember, if you aim for quality throughout all of your search engine optimisation activities you’ll not only be doing Google a favour, but your reputation as well!

The web is a pretty wide frontier nowadays, which is why Google can’t just base their page ranking on the apparent relevance of a particular website and that is why they monitor certain ‘off site’ factors – essentially the number and quality of links which direct towards your page from any outside sources. In terms of optimisation this creates an oppourtunity as well as a challenge, and to be successful you will have to create as much traffic towards you page as possible – sounds difficult, well with the prevalence of user generated content online, from blogs to social media, uploading content can just be a matter of care and attention!

A great reason to embrace optimizing is because of with a little know how it can be a business activity that levels the virtual playing field, ensuring that your company sits alongside some of the biggest corporations in the world, right at the top of Google search!

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