SEO : Search Engine Essentials

The search engines are the gateway to internet content, indexing literally billions of web pages every month. Most people now have their browser home page set to either Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Around 6 billion searches are performed every month. You can type a type a word or two into a search engine and find exactly what you are looking for.... Well that's the theory, anyway.

In practice the search engines are continually updating their methods to work out what you REALLY want (which they often get wrong) as they attempt to cope with the ever-expanding amount of content. They also have to identify and filter out webmasters who try to manipulate their index, ie. attempt to get to the top of the search results even though they don't have the best or most popular content.

There is no guarantee that whatever magic formula gets us to the top of search results now will work this time next year. We must continually optimize and review, and keep up with the search engines. We must also not push too hard or too quickly, or the search engine may think it is being manipulated and exclude us from results.