As you may already know SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is how your site can be picked up and ranked highly in the search engines, such as Google.

One of the key elements of SEO are links, you want to get links pointing back to your site, however not all links are the same and you want the best sort of links coming back to your site rather than any old rubbish.

The best sorts of links are ones from sites that contain similar content to your own, so if you have a fishing site you would like to see lots of links coming back from other fishing sites, you may be thinking that at this point you know you can not get lots of these links because the companies like yours are your competition and they are not likely to help you get better rankings than them.

This is where planning comes into play, you need to think about what would make a potential rival want to give you a link from his site, what do you have that he values more than a link? If you are thinking at this point that you will link back to him in exchange for his link then you would be wrong, this used to be a trick used to fool the search engines but they are onto that one and the two links would be given a very low score.

Rather than swapping links you could offer the other site an article that would be of interest to their visitors, in this article you could include a link back to your site for more information.

Now you may not be able to do this with your closest rivals but if you can do it with similar but not directly competing sites this is a very good way of getting links, however writing all the articles and contacting all the sites can be a very time consuming process so to ensure it is done effectively and correctly you should use a SEO company to get the most from your linking.

Do the search engines know what your site is about?

You need to ensure that the search engines are able to read what is on your page, there are a few things that will stop the search engines reading your content, the two main things that cause an issue with search engines not being able to see the text on your pages are frames and Flash elements.

You have probably seen flash elements on websites in the past, they are images that often run like small film or roll through a slide show type presentation that often includes text, unfortunately it treats the text as though it were an image and there for the search engines can not read the content.

Frames allow content from a different place to be included into a page this is often used by sites that do comparisons on prices where they draw in content from databases or for sites that do not want people to have to download the header graphic every time they go to a new page, unfortunately this causes the search engines some problems as what they see are 2 pages one with the navigation and the other with no navigation just content and it confuses them.

To get the most from your website it should conform to the W3C standards.

So how do you get found in the search engines?

Well with the search engines where you are found or your positioning is all important, it is estimated that Google find and index approximately 30 billion pages a year – that is around 6 new pages for every person on the planet – you need to be doing something special to be found amongst all the background noise, and this is where Search Engine Optimisation or SEO comes in.

Search engine optimisation is all about telling the search engines what a page on your website is about and suggesting to them the best way for them to index it.

If you were to look in the search engines for this website, you know it is called “be found or die” but that is all the information you have, putting this phrase into Google brings back an astounding 174,000,000 pages – obviously for a business such as ours it is important for us to be found at the top of that list (and we are) and it is SEO that enables us to do this.

We tell the search engines what the pages on our site are about and the search engine then includes them in the appropriate index, they have a scoring system to ensure that the most appropriate pages are delivered up to visitors for the various searches completed and this is what is known as the Google algorithm it is a scoring system that takes into account approximately 100 different factors to deliver the correct pages to the searcher.