Even with today’s level of internet knowledge it seems that there is still a huge amount of people out there who do not know what search engine optimisation is or why their website needs it if it is going to stand any chance of succeeding in the internet arena. During this article I hope to clear both of the above to problems up.

Before we get into search engine optimisation or SEO as it’s also known you really need to understand a few basic principles. First of all a search engine is a portal that displays results to internet users in response to a specific keyword search. You may now be thinking well what is a keyword search?

A keyword is a word by which you wish to find a specific website. As an example if you wanted to find a website about hotels in the Manchester area a good keyword to search on could be Manchester hotels. After you have inputted your keyword and clicked go it’s the job of the search engine to provide you with the most relevant results.

The internet is becoming more and more competitive everyday with lots of new websites joining if you like every second. This is where top quality search engine optimisation really comes into play.

It’s the job of the search engines to produce the most relevant results to a user. To do this it has to rank each and every website in order of importance based on numerous ranking factors. The job of an SEO is to pre-empt these ranking factors so that the search engines will deem their website more relevant than the next and reward it with a higher ranking.

The search engines are improving on a minute by minute basis so as a good SEO you need to keep yourself up to date with all of the latest changes and updates. All of this now leads me nicely on to the reason why your website needs SEO. The search engines are improving like I said minute by minute so if you or somebody else is not actively optimising your website then somebody else will be optimising theirs and it will be their website that ranks higher than yours. Its best to view top rankings like a race. If you work hard at keeping your website up to date then you will stay up front if you stop or slow down somebody else will overtake you.