• What is a Web Search Engine
• What is Search Engine Marketing
• Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the dynamic practice of improving or increasing the volume and/or the quality of traffic to a website generated from search engines through organic search results. [Results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to being advertisements] Characteristically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. The practice of SEO is to target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, blogs and industry vertical specific search engines which is a vital tool for modern business. SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for to generate targeted traffic. Optimising a website primarily involves two elements. One is to edit its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords & to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines while the second element involves getting links from other websites so that search engines define a particular webpage as important for a certain subject.

SEO services are often provided as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics should ideally be incorporated into website re-development and redesign. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that have been optimized to maximize search engine results.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods including link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

The best organic search engine optimisation campaigns integrate a number of SEO strategies to improve the level of traffic and enquiries from a website. Elements of an effective natural SEO campaign are:

• Keyword Research
• Competitive Analysis
• On Page Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Copywriting
• Link Building (Backlinks)
• Website Traffic (Analytics)

What is a web search engine?