Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  What is a Search Engine?

The answer is rather simple. Google, Yahoo! MSN, AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile etc

Basically a search engine is software that performs a search for keywords based on built in algorithms. Without search engines, it would be extremely difficult to browse the internet as there are over 60 million websites today. Search engines work by storing information about a large number of web pages, which they retrieve from the internet.

Search Engine Optimization

This is also known as website promotion or marketing. These are things you do to you webpages to get a good ranking with the search engines. This is so because most internet users use search engines to search for keywords. The page found are retrieved by a spider from a large database.  Data about web pages is stored in an index database for use in queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page as well as information about the web pages, whereas some store every word of every page it finds.

When a user comes to the search engine and makes a query, typically by giving keywords, the engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean terms AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query.

A number of factors are important when optimising a website: