Search Engine Optimisation

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving the volume of internet traffic to a website from a search engine, by placing the website higher in the search results.

Search Engine Optimisation is important because the higher on the results list a website appears, the more likely the site is to be visited. This results in greater user awareness of the company/product/service that the web page is for. More traffic means more potential customers which results in more profit, from both sales and the sale of advertising space.

Four search engines are Google, Yahoo!, Baidu (China) and Live Search.
Google had 135 million visitors from the US alone in one month.
Yahoo.com attracts at least 1.575 billion visitors annually, while the network of Yahoo! receive 3.4 billion page views daily.
Baidu has an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files, with over 5.5 million visitors annually.
Live Search processes over 2.5 billion queries every month.

SEO can be improved through a number of different ways.
Create dynamic titles; use titles that is relevant to the information, and use a heading formatting tag, to increase its importance to both search engines and users.
Write a relevant META tag; META tags are found in the

and contain keywords, a site description and author information.
Create a sitemap; sitemaps include all the links in your page, and a search engine uses the links in a page to determine its relevance. Enough said.
Use tooltips; tooltips are descriptive text that appear over text and images when the mouse hovers over them.
Ping your content; using a ping feature informs a search engine when you update your site, and recently updated sites are more likely to have a higher ranking.
Create an account with Google; as Google is the world’s largest search engine, making them aware of your site is likely to give your site a higher rating. After creating an account, verify your site. (Complete instructions can be found here, http://tutorialblog.org/8-tips-to-improve-search-engine-optimisation/ ).
Links; the higher the number of inbound links in your site(links to your site from other sites), the higher priority a search engine will attach to your site.
Key Words; Headlines and Title Tags should always contain key words regarding the content of your website.
Category Pages; creating theme or category pages results in related data being found in a single place, meaning search engines will place greater importance on said page.
Highlighting Content; highlighting content prominently on your page, such as a “Top 5” list once again attracts a search engines attention.