SEO - Search engine optimisation or optimization.

SEO, Search engine optimisation or optimising your website,  is often bundled together and described  as one element or skill, however it is actually a group of elements  which overlap and complement each other, with a common goal i.e. to make your website feature high in the search engine results.

So what are the things that need to be taken into consideration when choosing how to build your website? Firstly you need to decide if you are going to use a web designer, a off the shelf website content management system, or design and build the website yourself.

Please be careful if you decide to use a content management system as good SEO requires that you are able to have access to the "meta tags" or "meta data" of your web pages so it is very important when choosing a website content management system that you can edit the meta information on each page.

Please see our quick guides to choosing how to build your website for more information.

SEO issues to consider

Some of the points to consider when optimising your website are;

• Content - Good quality unique content.
  
• Domain & Page names - use descriptive relevant names
  
• Keyword density - Highly relevant keywords in your page text
  
• Links - Relevant Inbound and outbound links to a page
  
• Validation - make sure your pages are valid 3W (x)HTML
  

It is very important to follow good SEO guide lines when dealing with each of the aspects listed above. It is easy to make mistakes on these elements of your pages and the consequences of doing any of these elements incorrectly can be severe. Your website can be  even dropped from search engines altogether if you make some of the common SEO mistakes.

Please see our quick guides on each SEO element for further information on Search engine optimisation.