Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a step you have to go through during your website development process (which, by the way, it never ends) to ensure that you reach the people you want to reach, in other words to reach your target audience. Whatever goods or services your company sells, there is a certain market for it, and your business could benefit tremendously from a search engine optimization campaign. SEO is part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which deals also with paid inclusion.

If you search Google for your products, where does your company show up? Where are your competitors positioned? If your potential customers would do a similar search would they find you? “Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.” (Wikipedia)

There are a lot of elements and techniques to be built-in a website during the design step in order to get a good search engine exposure. Also, there are techniques that you don’t want them incorporated into your website. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indexes. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.

“The leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their search results. To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine’s database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled.” (Wikipedia)

Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. “SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals… The design of the website must first build the brand and present a viable marketing strategy which results in higher conversion rates and profitability.” (The V7 Network)