Search engine optimisation is a technique of increasing the visibility of the website and hence generating more traffic to the website. A search engine lists down web pages based on the keywords searched and after considering various parameters it decides on the ranking of each web page. Designing a website that satisfies those parameters is how it works. Also known as SEO, this practice gained particular significance after organisations started understanding the importance of higher rankings by getting their websites search engine friendly. The logic is, higher the rank of the web page, the more it will be noticeable and hence more number of visitors to the website. Visitors are considered to be potential customers. Organisations started using search functionality as marketing tools with optimisation being a major contributor in this area.

The search operation is usually based on some algorithmic calculation and use special type of programs to find pages and create a database for their search results. Such programs are usually called web crawlers or spiders and indexers, which pull out links to other pages, picks up relevant words from the page and their occurrence, and the structure. Once the website and its pages are registered in the search engine’s repository, the site is said to be indexed. Depending on how effectively seo is carried out, the ranking is thus decided.

Search engine optimisation primarily begins with studying the business and the keywords that will be used. Keywords are words that are relevant to the theme/business of the website and which the users would probably use for their searches. There are other factors that contribute such as structure of the website, content of the website, designing tool used, keywords used, link building, and so on.

• The coding and structure of the website has to be such that the required tags (Title, META, and Heading) must be properly placed in the code. Also all the necessary keywords should be included in these tags.
• Sometimes, depending on the tool used for designing the website, some amount of unnecessary code gets added in the page. This might mislead the web crawlers and hinder the process.
• Using adequate amount of content with appropriate positioning of relevant keywords is also an important factor in SEO. However, make sure that keywords are not unnecessarily stuffed, as this might work negatively for the website.

Search engine optimisation may be effective in getting some return on investment. However, the results and listings of the search engines may keep varying for various updates in its algorithm and hence SEO needs to be strategically implemented.

Jeff Smith is the managing director of Karma Technologies and feels strongly about implementing ways to be green into their business practices, to a point they are almost a paper-free company.