Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or as it is also known ( but with a slightly different lean ), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) used to be a dark art, it was secretive, hidden words and symbols and meta keywords. Most of what a SEO implemented on a website was completely beyond the ken of his/her clients.

Nowadays the art has evolved and much of this is thanks to the ever fluctuating but ever dependable algorithm which Google devised to support its own raison d’être. You see that Google’s very existence is down the fact that it delivers good search results. I shudder when I use Bing as I know that it may well throw up ludicrous and unusable results in its results. Google is king because the first page or two you come to after performing a search will include pretty much all the best sources for solving your query. If any search engine failed to meet this criterion it would soon be dropped by the savvy public.

Hence, and this is clarity and beauty of the highest order, Google makes sure that the searcher (their client to be precise) will be satisfied with their product.

What makes a good website ?

• Clear Identity – “it does what it says on the box”
• Good navigational structure
• Clearly defined sections
• Loads at reasonable speed
• Is accessible
• Can be said to be a useful source of information/ services
• Is recognised by others as a good website

These are some of the things that Google places a high importance upon when considering the validity of your website in its sphere so these are the things you, and your SEO/ SEM agency need to consider when either building a new site or attempting to increase traffic to an existing one.

It is no longer a dark art, SEO you know, it is serving us all, it drives us to create better, more relevant and richer websites, it is the good influence on web site designers and coders, it is the force of natural selection driving the evolution of websites today.

an aside – if Google decided that any website with a huge black circle in the middle of their home page would automatically go to page one in the search results for their <title> tag keywords, do you think that anyone would follow…….