Search Engine Optimisation – Lesson 1

The first step to understanding search engine optimisation is understanding search engines and the relationships between them. Search engines are one of the most popular tools for finding products and services and therefore it is important that seo’s understand the mechanics of them.
It has been quoted that search engines receive around 400,000,000 searches everyday on average. The searches are performed with keywords which usually consist of between 2 – 5 words.
In response to this query search engines attempt to give the searcher the most relevant result to their query. Search engine optimisation is knowing how to structure your site in such away that promotes your pages for their targeted keywords.
It is important to remember at this point that most web searchers will rarely go further than the first 3 pages, that is why a top 30 position is a sort after goal, especially on high traffic keywords.
There are many search engines but there are only 3 you should worry about optimising for Google/Yahoo/Msn or Live search. These receive 95% of all Internet traffic and any seo should be sticking to the techniques and guidelines they offer.
This first lesson is going to be aimed at understanding and explaining search engines and how we should optimise our pages in order to gain the greatest results.
Search engines are separated into 4 categories, crawlers, directories, META engines and paid inclusion engines.
Crawler based engines are also referred to as spiders as they use software known as bot, robot, spider or crawler. Sites are crawled and the most relevant pages are placed at the head of search engine results. Spider engines mainly consist of the big 3 and our search engine optimisation efforts need to aimed at them.
When I mentioned directories what I should have said is human edited directories. The pages in these directories are edited solely by manual submission. These directories are important for 2 reasons, one, they help the crawlers find your pages and two, the position of you pages within the directories can be an influential factor on your crawler indexing.
Meta engines combine results from a number of the bigger search engines to give you their most relevant results. It compiles and ranks the results and gives them to you in a comprehensive results list.
Some search engines also offer paid listings which put simply means you pay to be guaranteed a top listing for your chosen keywords. Google MSN and Yahoo all offer this marketing service with Google adwords being the most popular.
The next lesson I do on seo will be focusing more on the different types of search engines and how you should implement search engine optimisation.