Search Engine Optimization

Over the last 10 years, search engines have slowly began to dominate the way that we search for things on the internet. Whether it be a service, piece of information or a video the majority of people will now use a search engine to find it. While there are 100's of search engines, only one has quickly risen to claim dominance over the web. Google is the largest and most used search engine controlling almost 80% of the global search traffic.

Search engines act in a similar way to the search feature on most desktop pc's and apple mac's, you simply enter a search string of what you want to find and the search engine will then return a set of web pages containing what it is you have searched for. Now given the size of the World Wide Web there are literally billions of web pages to search through. This is where search engines apply an 'algorithm' (set of rules) to filter out any irrelevant content in an effort to return only web pages that are relevant to what you have searched for.

Now like any other programme search engines can be manipulated to show certain web pages near the top of their results pages and this is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are good and bad ways to do this typically known as white and black hat techniques. The aim of SEO is to tell search engines that your web pages are high in quality and extremely relevant to a specific number of search terms (keywords).