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Search engine optimisation, commonly abbreviated to SEO, is in simple terms the process of attempting to make a website or blog as attractive as possible to the search engines. The idea is to first of all attract the spiders of said search engines which crawl the Web indexing all its many pages and to subsequently impress them with the various aspects of the site or blog's content.

The very first step in successful SEO is in determining the URL of a website or blog. There are a great many people who are unaware of the importance of this procedure, which is made doubly so by the fact that it is something which can never be changed for the lifetime of the website or blog. The URL is effectively the website or blog's address on the Internet and the part which we can determine is that which follows, "www." The URL should be extremely specific as to the content of the site and contain at least one of the keywords which we will be employing. It is also of vital importance that the title of a website or blog matches the URL as closely as possible. It is these two factors which will play the biggest part in attracting the attention of the spiders in the first instance.

Key words and key phrases should appear frequently in the textual content of our website or blog. They should be extremely relevant to the overall topic and should subsequently be used to tag the page where this facility is offered. These key words and phrases can be loosely defined as those which we may expect someone who would be searching for a particular nature of website to input in to a Google search.

The content on the site or blog must be extremely detailed, totally unique and not copied from elsewhere on the Web, and relevant at all times to the overall subject. It should also be updated frequently to keep the site fresh. It is advisable also at this stage to include a number of outbound links to other sites or blogs on a similar topic. This pleases the search engine spiders as remember it is a Web which sites are built on. Think of all the tendrils of same which are required to link together to form the bigger picture and you will get the general idea.

It is subsequently essential to obtain links coming in to the site or blog from others around the Web. This can be achieved in a great many ways from employing other blogs and social networking sites, to submitting the URL to social book-marking sites, to even e-mailing the Webmasters of similar sites and requesting a mutual link exchange. The number of sites linking to a Web page is another very important factor in achieving quality SEO.

The processes described above get the process of SEO up and running but it must be remembered that this process is not a temporary one and it must be tweaked at regular intervals for the duration of the site or blog's lifetime if the site or blog is firstly to achieve and subsequently maintain high search engine ranking.

Learn more about this author, Gordon Hamilton.
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