Search Optimisation - What is Search Optimisation?

The internet is massive. Search optimisation or SEO makes it smaller. In 2005 Google reported over 8 billion websites.  This year the number of users world-wide will exceed 2 billion.  That is a lot of traffic.  Finding your way through it is a daunting task and search engines are constantly evolving how they do it.  When you type search terms into a search engine, it isn’t just looking for those words, but using a variety of other highly complex means to determine the best sites for you to choose from.  A website which ranks among the top ten websites in your search was likely search optimised.  This means their site was manipulated to get a better ranking with the search engine than other similar websites.Search engines are using dynamic methods to determine how to rank sites.  Not only do they look for the search terms in the website, but they rank how often that website was selected when those search terms were used.  This kind record keeping is a huge undertaking, but it means that the more your site is selected the higher it will rank on the search engine.  Search engines are also keeping track of the IP address (the internet address of the computer) which did the search.  When one computer does a search using a set of keywords and selects a site, the next time they conduct a search and select the same site, that site does not get any improvement in its ranking.  This is the way search engines foil people trying to falsely improve their site ranking by searching for their own site again and again. There is no more room for false search optimisation.  Another method search engines are using to rank websites is by the number of links from other websites to the website being ranked.  A website which has numerous links to it from other sites will rank higher than a website with few links pointing to it. However, this ranking can be deceptive as it discounts websites that only contain links or when too many websites are maintained by a single ISP with links pointing to other managed websites.  So, if your ISP is performing your search optimisation, be wary if they want to point a lot of links to your site from other sites they maintain.