Search engine optimisation (Americans spell this optimization) can be a bit daunting but although it's a rich subject with many layers,  the basic principle of SEO is quite simple.

Naturally, everyone wants to be on the first page of a search engine's result - but, hey, there's rather a lot of other web sites - and the temptation is to try and find some magic trick to increase your web site visibility on the internet, but be warned, the answer is quite simple - good content and lots of hyperlinks to different parts of your web site are the key to getting a high score with search engines such as Google.

In the course of our research on SEO we've found some very useful resources that should prove interesting to anyone starting to get a handle on this (vast) subject.

The basic premise is this;

Search engine providers such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and Ask have a simple mission, to ensure that their customers can find relevant results based on the search terms entered.

To achive this goal, search engines create an index of each web site that they are aware of using a piece of software called a spider.

A spider's view of a web site is quite different to a human view, in that images and flashy formatting are pretty much ignored.

When a spider crawls a web site (i.e. accesses the various pages), it is only able to see the 'visible' text and to a certain extent ignores 'code'.

Once the spider has made a 'copy' of the web site the results are then subjected to highly secretive parsing and pattern checking - in other words algorithms are used to figure out what all that text is actually about and an 'index' is created.

Noise is stripped out - e.g. words like 'and', 'or' 'it' etc. are filtered out for the purpose of trimming down the web site content into 'key phrases and words'.

I mentioned earlier that spiders ignore the code to a certain extent. While this is tru insofar as the rendering and formatting are concerned, spiders do actually react to the coding of a site.

The logic is simple; search engines want to provide their customers with a pleasant experience, the last thing they want to do is direct a customer to a web site that would break their browser.

Huh? Yes it's true, badly coded sites can sometimes cause difficulties to a web browser. At the very least the web site won't render correctly, we've been guily of this in the past, but in our defence I should mention that web browsers themselves can add to the mix.

To explain:

• When you go to a web site your browser basically requests that the web server send it the code and resources needed to recreate the page on your screen - this is called rendering.
• The web server 'tells' the browser what version of HTML (hypertext markup language) it is using - there's quite a few so this is an important step in ensuring that the web site renders (displays) correctly.
• Certain browsers will be forgiving, they will fill in the pieces that may be missing and try to render the page regardless of errors
• Other browsers are much more strict and will fail to render pages that have too many errors or use conflicting coding instructions
• Spiders also get this piece of information and can tell if there's coding issues that might cause the page to render incorrectly (or not all) based on the 'standard' of code that has been implemented.
• If there's too many errors the spider may have difficulty actually working out what text exists on the page, worse still, it may have to give up - although this is a pretty extreme scenario.

 What can you do ?

• You should make sure that your web site doesn't contain any coding errors that might score negatively against you. Use the W3C validator to do this.
• Use meta tags to provide additional information to the spider and help in defining what each page is about - there's two parts to this.
  • Meta tags can be used to lend emphasis to the words you feel are relevant to the page these may be words that appear in the narrative of your web page or may be variants that are relevant but do not actually appear. 
  • Two meta tags have particular value. The 'title' tag is used on the search engine result page and the 'description' tag is used as the 'abstract' that is displayed on search engine result pages
  • If you use these tags correctly it will enhance how your link looks when it actually appears in search results
  • To see an example of this click on this link - the first result (hopefully) is our good selves and you will see how the page title and 'abstract' work for our home page.
  • The title tag on our home page is 'website design and development' (use the 'view source' option to see the actual code on our home page) and the description tag contains just enough text to display in a way that we believe correctly summarises the home page content.
  • If we didn't have a description tag the search engine would simply scrape the first few words from the home page text, not as aesthetically pleasing and probably not that inviting.
• Also - read what Google have to say about search engine placement.
• Use a site map, this is a pretty good way to ensure that all of your site content is actually being submitted to search engines.
  • A sitemap looks like this (click here to view our site map), the syntax and purpose of site maps is explained on Google and on the Smart IT site but dont panic, there's plenty of different ways to create a sitemap
• Check your web site to see what it looks like to a spider using the Lynx browser, if you click on this link here and enter http://www.fanore.com you can use the excellent online tool from Delorie Software to see what the Fanore Software web site looks like to a spider - it aint pretty but it works, and illustrates just how important text links are.
• Another useful thing to know is that you can very quickly check to see what information (if any) a search engine has about your web site.

• If you type the following (site:www.fanore.com) into a search engine like windows live, yahoo or the ubiquitous google then you will be presented with a list of all the content that the search engine has accessed on our web site - replace www.fanore.com with your own site address - but be warned, the results can be VERY depressing ! We got quite a shock when we started to use this to measure how effective we were at SEO, ahh to be humbled - AGAIN.

You should consider visiting the truly excellent blog called Sebastien's Pamphlets- there's a huge amount of information on this site about search engine optimisation; although I have to admit it can be quite daunting at first.

There'll be more on this topic as we climb this learning curve - we like to share the pain!