The buzz on the street is that SEO is the key to a successful website, so what exactly is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a technique used to make the pages on your website useful for your visitors while making them more understandable to search engines. If your website is optimised correctly it will help you to get more page views as your site will appear higher in the search engine rankings and therefore more people are likely to know of its existence.

Key factors for SEO

• Good content – Content is King! When a search engine places your site in its database, it ranks it according to the relevancy of the content on your pages. Therefore your primary focus should be the content of your site. Keep your content relevant to the category that you are promoting. It is a good idea to add fresh content on a regular basis. It not only means that you get visitors returning to your site, but when the search engines spider your site they find new content and this will affect your status. Also remember to write your own content. Content “lifted” from other sites is likely to be indexed in the search engines already, and if everyone is using the same content how is your site more relevant that the next one?
• Valid HTML – a vital step, but one which can be overlooked by many designers/developers. Creating valid HTML is a very simple process and checking/validating the HTML pages of your site takes very little time. Make sure the web designer you use validates all the pages they create. This is also important for future-proofing your website so that future browsers will be able to interpret your site. Valid HTML can also make sure your pages get spidered much more than meta keywords and meta descriptions.
• Good keyword phrases – what makes up a good keyword phrase can be tricky, but that is what you should be optimising your page for. Try to come up with a phrase that encompasses what your site is all about. Keyword research is a key component to optimising your site. It is not possible to come up with every keyword phrase imaginable, instead think about what you would enter into a search engine to find your site. You may have to think and rethink before you come up with a suitable phrase. Once decided on, this phrase is repeated in the content of your site, headlines and links within the page.
• Optimise pages not the whole site – this last point might sound a little contradictory. Many web developers may want to come up with one keyword phrase and then optimise the whole site for that phrase. A better method is to optimise each page using that phrase that works best for that page of content. By doing it this way, if, for example, you have 5 pages on your site optimised for 5 different keyword phrases, you have 5 chances of somebody finding your site. If your whole site is optimised for just one keyword phrase, you only have the 1!

Final thoughts
It can take a long time to see the results of SEO. It is worth resubmitting the pages of your site to the major search engines on a regular basis. Even if you ask a search engine to spider your website or a specific page, it can take days for it to show up in the results. If you are optimising an existing web page that is already in the search engine database, it can take even longer for your changes to take effect. The important thing to remember is it can be hard work to get a top 10 (first page) ranking in most search engines. You may need to fine-tune your pages and experiment with keywords, but the rewards can be immense if you persevere.