One of the most important parts of having a website built is making sure it is found easily. it is unfortunatly the most miss sold part of owning a website.

Organic Search Engine Optimisation

Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is getting a website retured in the Search Engine Return Pages ( SERP) naturally. By this we mean, based on the information that is presented on the page taking account of the relevant Meta Data that is used by search engines.

To understand how to achieve this, it is important to gain an understanding of how a search engines work and how they harvests their informatiom. So let us look at the three key components:

1. The robot that is used to harvest the information.
2. The storage unit used by the search engine to hold its information.
3. The client User Interface for the search engine (The search engines website).

As most modern search engines operate the same way we will pick an example search engine and work our way through the process. the diagram on the right is a hystogram based on UK search engine popularity and as Google stands out we will look at this search engine in a bit more detail.

Search engines are not created with an index of websites, when Goggle was first presented as a model back in 1998 it was populated with only a few thousand returns base on a given query. One of the things that made Google stand out was the method used to process the enquiry (query) from the user as it was much faster that any other search engine and its degree of accuracy was consistant. These atributes made Google an imediate success and ten years on the most dominat force in search engine technology on the world wide web.

Before a search engine can inform you that there is a relevant document, file or website it first has to find it itself. In order to do this it will utilise a special piece of robotic software call a spider. In Google’s  case this is call the Googlebot, the Googlebot in the first instance will select a URL from the ”URL Server” which is part of Google infrastructure. Once the spider reaches the selected URL it will harvest all of the links it finds and follow each of them gathering and storing information about each.

SEO (Google)