A SEO Introduction

Article Audience: Generic Users

So what exactly is SEO? Search Engine Optimization are techniques and guidelines which help you to create a website which contains content which is better than that of your competitors such that you are guaranteed a top position in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

Search Engines

The largest majority of traffic to a website comes via search engines results. Also as you probably know and have first hand experience of (and this has been proved through reaserch), most users only view the first few results that a search engine provides. Rarely does a user scroll beyond the second page of search engine results. So if you really want to drive traffic to your site, you must make sure that you reach the top most results of search engine result pages for keywords that customers use in search engines.

Search Engine Results

Search engines are businesses (very good businesses in fact, Google is living testament of this). Obviously, to be successful they need to provide the search engine user with relevant search results (as quickly as possible). Having good results guarantees a steady customer base, and this brings guaranteed advertising revenue.

There are two main kinds of search engine results:

Natural

These are the search engine results which have been determined to be the best according to the search engine's algorithm and have been ranked according to their relevance. We want to achieve good results here. You can not influence these search results by paying the search engine any money. The results here are determined solely by the search engine ranking algorithms.

Advertising

these are results which arrive there simply by payment. These are usually separate from the real search engine results such that users can determine that these are "sponsored". These are the results which generate revenue to the search engine. To feature here it is extremely simple - $$$

If you want to fork out money and feature in the advertisements for search engines this is quite simple to achieve. Google Adwords is probably the best method to feature on paid search engine results. The wonderful thing about Google Adwords is that you control exactly the traffic that comes to

However, if you are prepared to invest time (and probably money too) to rank in the real search engine results, the end result will mean sustained traffic for a much longer period of time. Getting ranked in the real search engine results requires time, patience and dedication, so be prepared.