What is SEO ?
SEO is in fact both an art and a science. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering. In many
respects it's simply quality control for websites. Having said that if there was ever an industry that was little understood by 'outsiders' it's SEO.
Having a company's website be relevant to lots of words or phrases and positioning 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 organisations attempt to make themselves more relevant and increase their rankings in search listings, is by optimising their sites for the search engines; hence, Search Engine Optimisation – SEO.
The search engine makes a determination as to :
- what sites are relevant for the word(s) the user has typed in and
- in what order to list them. This determination is worked out by a hugely involved and complicated algorithm written into the search engine itself.
So for the word ‘computer’, the search engine will first look at all the sites which it considers relevant to computers and then display them in an order that it will calculate, based on a series of things.
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; not at Intercomms Global Ltd. We have developed an SEO engine that is defining the industry.
