An executive, non technical introduction to the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and a guide to selecting an SEO provider.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a vital part of any successful online marketing strategy. The effectiveness, accountability and transparency of SEM has made it the most widely used online marketing medium in the world.

The purpose of SEM is to increase visibility on search engines such as Google. Visibility can be developed through either paid or natural listings. On Google, the paid listings appear as 'sponsored links' above and to the right side of the main natural listings. The means of building visibility via paid listings is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC), while the process of building natural/organic search engine visibility is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In this article we will focus on SEO.

How do search engines actually work?

To understand how to approach SEO it's useful to understand the basics of how search engines determine their natural results. Their process, in simple terms, is:

* Search engine programs, called 'web crawlers', or 'spiders', browse the Web and take copies of billions of pages that they later process. The spiders crawl from page to page and from website to website, following hyperlinks. A search engine will index all the pages of your website if it can easily find it's way to them.

* The searcher types a query into a search engine, for example, 'buy designer shoes in Ireland'.

* The search engine software quickly sorts through millions of pages in its database to find the pages that best match this query. If your website or even a page from your website has content about buying designer shoes in Ireland you could possibly rank highly for this search query.

* The search engine presents a set of results based on a complex rating system. Search engines are looking for sites that:

? they can easily index

? have the right keywords and phrases

? are popular (mostly measured by the number of other websites that link to them)

? have some history ? not new sites

Remember that Google's paid and natural search systems operate completely independently. A paid search engine advertising campaign on Google will not have any effect, positive or negative, on your natural search engine listings in Google.

How to boost your search rankings

The search engines do not disclose the details of their rating systems however a website's natural search engine visibility can be greatly enhanced if firstly, it has a high ?popularity? rating and secondly, is search engine-friendly.

Increasing a websites popularity rating:

The ?popularity? of your website as measured by the search engines will largely determine your search engine rankings. ?Popularity? is also referred to as search power or search engine credibility. Google refer to their measure of popularity as 'PageRank' and score sites from 1 to 10. If you download and install the Google toolbar you can see the ?PageRank? that Google has assigned to your Web pages. No matter how search friendly a website is, if it has a low popularity rating it will not be highly ranked on search engines.

The most reliably way to build popularity is to develop quality, relevant links to your website from other websites. Links to your website increase the popularity of your website and boost your natural rankings with search engines. At Digino we have found that the most successful way to do this is to carry out a comprehensive series of Web directories registrations. Over the past 5 years we have build up a database of over 1,000 Web directories that we have measured to have an affect on a site's search power. We use a semi-automated process to register sites with selected directories over a period of time.

Developing a search engine friendly website

Ideally a website is firstly designed, written, built and managed in a search engine-friendly manner. However, whether a site is search engine friendly or not it can be ?optimisted? to boost it's search rankings. A search engine optimisation program will usually encompass analysing your website's underlying code, architecture and page content and then making various changes to the site to boost rankings. The SEO of your website needs to be ethical and in accordance with rules set out by the search engines. If the SEO of your website blatantly flaunts these rules the search engine may penalise your search rankings and ultimately can remove your website from the search engine results.