What is Search engine optimisation aka SEO

To be successful web pages and a web site must fulfil two needs. The first is fairly obvious, the second takes some understanding.

• It needs to be pleasing to the human being who is looking at your site. The need to see what they want. This is often pictures so its not just a plain boring heap of text. It often includes testimonials from satisfied customers, call to action: please buy  etc.
• It needs to cater for Search engines need. Search engines use things called robots or spiders (because they crawl the web). These tirelessly look at everything they can find. A little kindness to them will often pay dividends: this is known as Search Engine optimisation or SEO.

When a web page is laid out it uses hidden bits of code to put "content" aka text and pictures in a hopefully pleasing way. SEO Robots use these hidden bits of code to decide how interesting a page may be (amongst other things). If certain bits of code are not there, then the robot considers the page boring in the same way we would see a plain mass of text with no paragraphs, titles etc. An example of this is called a H1 tag. H1 Tags are written as < H 1 > Some text here < / H 1 >. Actually on any page the H1 Tag is pretty important to Google's robots (Yahoo, Bing and other search engines too).

So one of the first things to do is understand the language that web pages are written in, because this is what any SEO robot sees.

Googling "HTML for dummies" will get you started there. If you understand (at least in broad terms) how web pages are displayed then many of the substantial number of articles about SEO will start to make sense.

Whatever you use to publish your web site should prompt you to enter "terms" (descriptive text) for the various things that search engines use to categorise your web pages. If your publishing tool does not do this, change it for one that does.

Now you can start using the tools that help you score how well you are doing at SEO.

• Free SEO tools to get you started