This article will explain the basics of search engines and what they do.

When looking into website design, website related services and website hosting, you will come across this term a LOT: search engine optimisation (usually abbreviated to "SEO").  Unlike many website designers, we will actually tell you in plain english what it is all about and how it works. 

Don't get us wrong - there are many 'trade secrets' invovled with techniques and tactics for search engine optimisation, but we WILL tell you what you need to know to make an informed decision when picking a search engine optimisation expert.

...you will come across this term a LOT: search engine optimisation (usually abbreviated to "SEO")

What Are Search Engines?

Trying to find things manually on the internet would be almost impossible.  You would type a business name, put ".com.au" on the end of it and hope for the best.  Not a good approach.  Search engines are similar to the White Pages or the Yellow Pages - massive indexes of everything on the internet (instead of phone numbers).  But there are some major differences between the "paper style" indexes and search engines.  Search engines essentially "index" the internet and then "rank" each individual website, according to the content of that website. So a website all about "plumbing" may rank well when someone searches for "plumbing", but probably wouldn't rank at all if someone searched for "laptop computer".  This is known as "relevance" - what a search engine thinks a given website is relevant to.

In the most basic terms, search engines provide a searchable database of nearly every website on the internet, and ranks those websites against what a user searched for.  The list of results that a user gets is sorted by relevance - which website was thought to be most relevant for the search requested.  Every website ranks differently for every search under the sun.  So its not just about "being search engine optimised", its also about being relevant. Targetting what you want your website to be relevant for is one of the most important things you can do with your website.  And you guessed it - this should be considered, planned and finalised before you even write the first keystroke of your website.

...search engines provide a searchable database of nearly every site on the internet, and rank those sites against what a user searched for

Which Search Engines Matter?

Many websites throw around lots of statistics and graphs, so we'll keep this very simple.  There are 5 search engines that have a majority of the search engine traffic on the internet (this means, the search engines that most people use to do their web searching).  Here's the Neilsen Ratings statistics for the month of December 2008:

Search Provider	# Searches	% Share
Total # across all engines	8,623,705	100%
Google	5,421,943	62.87%
Yahoo!	1,448,140	16.79%
MSN/Live Search	841,457	9.76%
Time Warner (AOL)	357,025	4.14%
Ask.com	169,116	1.96%
Other/Minor engines	386,024	4.48%

While many SEO services focus purely on Google (and for good reason, looking at the numbers - Google has the lion's share by far!), search engine optimisations should be performed with Google, Yahoo and MSN in mind (the "GYM" team!).  Percentage wise, Google is still king and probably will be for a very long time however, nearly 1.5 million searches are done with Yahoo! every month. That's a lot of searching.  Getting first and second page results in any of the "top 5" search engines will result in significant numbers of visitors to your site every month.

...nearly 1.5 million searches are done with Yahoo! every month...Getting first and second page results in any of the "top 5" search engines will result in significant numbers of visitors to your site

Learning More About SEO Undertakings

We suggest that you read all of these pages in our "Introduction to Search Engine" articles, in the order they are written (as in, using the "Search Engines" menu at the top of our site).  All of this search engine...stuff is important and all of it is extremely relevant to your website, even if Business Website Designers had nothing to do with your website's initial design.

If your website isn't built well for search engines as well as users, then you only have 3 real options available to generate more income from your website investment.  Those options are:

• Paid advertising - pay for regular media advertising to tell people about your wesbite or pay for advertising on the internet - pay sites to link to yours.
• Directory listings - get your site listed with "directory sites" (such as yellowpages.com.au).  The problem with this is that your site isn't the only one that will appear - many competitor sites will appear right next to yours.
• Use your site as the equivalent of an online brochure/leaflet - it's there, you can send people to see it, but very rarely is it attracting new business without you sending someone there first.

We suggest that you read all of these pages...this search engine stuff is important and all of it is extremely relevant to your website