Many people and businesses in the last ten years have been using SEO to help them create an online business presence in order to try get ahead of the competition. SEO is a multi-layered business strategy to help increase a websites popularity and reputation on the internet. Its starts with a process of writing well written, high quality content for your site that is unique and information rich. The general opinion is that if content is well written for humans it will be well written for search engines.

So why write well for search engines? It is estimated that 90% (if not more) of all internet users use search engines to navigate the internet. If a person is looking for information, or a product on the internet, it is as simple as typing it in a search engine and sifting through the results. Within the first few results the person searching should have found what they are looking for (everything else may as well not exist). It is a highly effective indexing system that takes many of the hassles out of Information Retrieval. But hiding behind this seemingly simple task of searching is a huge operation that makes the system work so well.

Key Words, what the spiders have their eye's on...

When a website is written there are certain Key Words attached to each page which help the search engines index your site. Search Engines rely on “Spiders”. These spiders are information seeking programs written by the search engine to “Crawl” through your websites pages and index all the information, and the key words, located with in it. But the spiders are very picky, and there is a lot of things that can be done wrong that may prevent them from accessing information, or simply ignoring it. It is important for the information to be written in such a way that it is unique, and, more importantly, well written.

The search engines now have an index of everything on a website so that when someone searches for something the website will be listed amongst the results, along with thousands of other pages that have also returned results. This is where it gets tricky. With thousands of results for one single request, how does one search through all of it to find what they want? This is where the search engines get clever and help out the user who is searching for the information.

The Top 10 is the place to be

Once the search results have been returned to the search engine, it is up to the Search Engines algorithms to decide which are the best results to display. In this step, relevance to the key word and reputation is the key. Only the most relevant results, with the best information to offer, and those with the highest reputation have a chance of getting into the search engines most sort after Top 10 spot.

Many businesses rely on SEO to bring the business to them. It is considered a great investment for businesses and is often one of the highest returns on their investment that a company can invest in. SEO can make or break a business, and once started is a vital part of many a websites success.