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Search engine optimisation, known in short as SEO, is considered to be one of the most cost effective promotional tools in the marketing sector and when you think about the fact that 85% of your customers will have most likely found your site via a search engine or a directory then you will appreciate how important good SEO is to get your business ranked highly in the search engine results.

The term SEO refers to search engine optimisation and search engine optimisers, who are a team of industry of consultants who carry out optimisation projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimisers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign.

Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term search engine friendly may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy to optimise.

The practice of search engine optimisation is all about making sure that the website evolves and grows. The way of doing this is by modifying both the internal and the external aspects of a site in order to increase the traffic that a site receives from search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a very broad field, with various aspects encompassing a variety of disciplines ranging from Web design and development to public relations.

Below are just a few examples of the main aspects that are involved in the search engine optimisation process:

' Meta-tagging

' Re-writing your URLs

' Image optimisation

' Page Rank sculpting

' Copywriting

' Web usability

' Branding

As the Internet has grown into the competitive market that it is today it has become an essential way of increasing revenue and generating commercial success online. This commercial success is best achieved through the process of search engine optimisation; however the use of SEO should include the latest ethical techniques, which is known as white hat SEO. This white hat SEO produces results that last a long time. It is about creating content for users not search engines. In many ways SEO is similar to web development that promotes accessibility and it is not just about following guidelines. As with all things white hat SEO has an opposite, known as black hat SEO. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by search engines. Search engines may penalise sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.

Search engine optimisation is about more than fixing Meta information and writing content; it's about research and analysis. You need to know what a website should display and then apply this to the site to give it the best possible chance of succeeding within the search engine results.