Almost every business that launches a web site, wants to be listed in search engine indexes so that their target market can find them when surfing the web. However, just being listed in the search engine indexes is not enough, especially if your products and services are ranked or found on page 25 of the search results.

Submitting your web site to Search Engines and Directories is the easy part. Ensuring that you receive the best possible results is another matter entirely, and requires planning and preparation which is usually called optimisation.

Search engine optimisation or SEO as it is becoming more commonly know, refers to the act of structuring and altering your web site, so that it will rank well for particular terms in the search engines results.

Search engines such as Google create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web. The spider visits a web page, and everything it finds goes into the search engine index. The index contains a copy of every web page that the spider finds, and if a web page changes the index is updated with new information.

Once a site has been indexed, it is then entered into the search engine, which sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and ranks them in order of what it believes is most relevant.

Directories such as Yahoo are different to search engines, as they use human editors to review your web site and decide if it is suitable for inclusion. However, many search engines use the directory's databases as well, to add new web sites to their listings and give them prominence in search results.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to guarantee a top search engine ranking across all the search engines all the time.

There are many reasons for this including, the 1,000's of new sites that are added to the index, a competitor for the same keyword phrase has resubmitted or the search engine changed it's algorithm or it's URL submission procedure.

Search engines do not reveal their algorithms and only gives you a general idea of what they consider when ranking a site, therefore optimisation is a constant process of analysis, submission, monitoring, and fine tuning. However, there are some basic techniques that need to be applied.

The five basic components of optimising your web site for the best possible search engine ranking are:

Meta Tags

Page Title

Body Content

Images

Link Popularity

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