Having a company's website be relevant to lots of words or phrases and making it as high up the list of displayed sites as is possible can be worth huge amounts of money in terms of increased site traffic and by extension increased custom. How websites and companies try to make themselves more relevant and higher up the search listings is by optimising their sites for the search engines; hence, Search Engine Optimisation – SEO.

How Does Search Engine Optimisation Work?

The algorithm each search engine uses is a closely guarded secret, since if it were readily available it would quickly collapse; as everyone would make their sites as high on search and relevancy lists as possible using the algorithm’s criteria as a guide. So for the most part people use an educated guess. Search engine companies like Google do give some hints, especially as to bad practise, and some aspects can be found by trail and error.

SEO writing and consulting companies work hard to find the happy medium between bad practise and getting good relevancy and high listing placements. Various different tactics such as effective use of keywords, Meta tags and external links all help with boosting a site’s ranking (how high up a search listing it comes), and there are a few more ways of doing this as well as other ways of attracting site traffic such as PPC ads.