Despite the fact that search engine optimisation (SEO) has been around for a very long time, there are constantly many newcomers to the term who need to understand it in order to promote their websites. The search engine results your website achieves will be done through effective search engine optimisation and it is this that will be the lifeline for your business success. Without your website showing on the search engine pages, you will not have customers. In order to be listed in the first, say, ten results you will have had to compete with literally thousands of similar websites. You will be facing not just national, but global competition. What you need to aim for is for your website to be on page one of the search engine results and you achieve this via search engine optimisation. There are various methods that you can employ for optimising your web pages for the search engine results.

Once you have achieved a suitable mindset to start to think about optimising your website, you should think about what basic keywords you want to use. You will need to undertake some research, because if you do not know the best keywords that will drive the most traffic to your website, your SEO will not be so effective. You should use the Google Keyword Tool to help you to do this. SEO needs to be based upon the keywords that are most likely to be used to search for your particular services or products. You will eventually settle on your primary keywords and these will be the most widely used keywords that people use on search engines when searching for what you have to offer. Once you know the right words or phrases to use, you can begin to optimise your web pages.

SEO can be achieved in two ways. The first is on page optimisation and the second is off site optimisation. In order to achieve the number one spot in search engine results, you need to ensure that you undertake both.

For on page optimisation, you should know what your primary keywords are even prior to starting your design in order to be the most effective. You should then add these keywords onto your pages and if you can do this effectively, it is possible to achieve very good results with very little link building. Make sure you place your keywords into your meta descriptions, on page titles, together with H1 and H2 tags, so that the search engine spiders can see them.

You can then move on to your secondary keywords. These are the keywords that are not so competitive as the primary keywords, but your clients may use these keywords in order to search out your business, services or products.

Link building is another method that you can employ to help your website to be seen by the search engines. This is referred to as off page optimisation. In other words, ensure that your url is mentioned on as many other websites as possible. If you can achieve incoming backlinks from high PR (page rank) sites, you can improve your own search engine results. Blogs, forums and using social media are all other methods that can be employed for improving your site’s online presence. This is time consuming, but once your site is appearing on page one of the search engines, you will reap the benefits.