Search Engine Optimization

If you have a website doing business on the internet, you would probably like to have people find your website. On the Internet people typically find websites using search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. Anybody with any computer experience knows what a search engine is. And they know that they can go to their favourite search engine and type in a few words related to the subject they're looking for and the search engine will give them a list of websites that match those keywords. The search engines find these sites, and sort them, based on certain attributes of the websites themselves. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the tweaking of these attributes in order to help a website place higher in the search results for their given keywords.

Many new website owners are unsure of what exactly needs to be done to a website to make it Search Engine Optimized. The truth is, the options vary, and nobody knows the exact techniques that will result in a 100% SEO'd website, and that's because the search engines don't announce the specific criteria that determine rankings.

The basic rules of how SEO is applied to a website can be broken down into two parts:

• On-page factors; and
• Off-page factors.

The on-page SEO basically tell the search engine spiders (which are just little programs that continuously move around the Internet examining sites), what kind of content your website contains, and what keywords that content relates to. The off-page factors operate like votes. Each website that has a link to your website essentially tells the search engine that they are voting for your site, and if the anchor text in the link contains your website's keywords, that strengthens the vote for your site, for those keywords.