SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is often thought of as a scary or too technical term but in its basic form it is quite a straight forward term. In writing this introduction to SEO I am hoping to also clarify my own thoughts and expectations about what SEO means in order that they can be fitted into the Eggnchips search engine for further analysis and experimentation.

Essentially, SEO is preparing your website for inclusion in search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live Search) in such a way that you get the best return out of it. Imagine you are about to give a speech - you want to look your best don’t you? and you want to make sure that everything is where it should be and that you are standing close enough to the microphone. Alternatively, imagine you are organising a party for a celebration - everything has to be just right. Guests need to be informed simply and consistently what the party is, where it is and who it is for. Search Engine Optimisation starts out as ensuring that things in your website make the best of the facilities the search engine has to offer. If you have any better metaphors I would love to hear them

Years ago many search engines were simple directories that listed website addresses much like a phone book, then they added a few extra things like descriptions and keywords so it became more like a yellow pages (yellow pages in the UK is a phone directory for businesses that allows them to include extra descriptions, etc). Search engines then started collecting all the main words in the website so they could be searched against - the natural extension to this was to allow for primary keywords that would more generally define a site and these became known as meta tags. Meta tags are simply keywords that ‘describe information’ and they play an important part in what is becoming known as the semantic web - but that’s for another day.

Nowadays there a millions, maybe billions, of web sites, blogs, and other things out there so when someone types something into a search engine and clicks search they are usually met with many many entries. Take my other blog for instance, www.jasonslater.co.uk which is a technology blog. If I type the word technology into Google it returns 971 million entries so what chance do I stand of someone visiting my blog? Perhaps I could search for “technology blog” which returns just over 64 million entries - but when I am searching for technology tips i would rarely use the word “blog” as I’m goal oriented and I don’t really care what the format of the website is. Now, if I search for “technology blog sme” as I talk a lot about Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Google now returns just 841,000 web pages so it looks like we are getting somewhere but each time I add a keyword I am thinning out my bets and if I get the keywords wrong - guess what - I’ve just lost my audience!

It is often written about that you really need to be in the first few pages of results in a search engine to really make a difference. Personally, I would also argue that the last few pages is just as important - I often look at the first page and the last page of results and ignore most of the ones in between - but that’s something for the academics to banter about.

So, I have worked hard on my website and have something important to say and I need to connect with interested readers so how do I get my website on the first page of results? This is where SEO can start to help - it isn’t a complete answer of course as there are many ways of “raising your profile” as it’s often referred to but using the right “meta tags” or keywords is an important factor to consider as part of getting a better ranking in search engines.

I will be writing more about SEO techniques with some practical examples so make sure you subscribe to the feed to ensure you don’t miss out. If you have any SEO experiences or tips you want to share then feel free. My aim in all this is to share some technical understanding and experiences of SEO through the development of a search engine - oh and hopefully connect with others who have similar interests.