What is search engine optimisation?

So what exactly is search engine optimisation?

Optimise: make optimal; get the most out of; use best; "optimise your website"

Search engine optimisation is a slightly confusing phrase as it suggests optimisation of the actual search engine. This is not the case. In actual fact the optimisation is applied to your website, although this is often implimented solely to acheive a high ranking on search engine listings.

The true aim of search engine optimisation, or website optimisation as we prefer to call it, is to ensure that each page of your website is at it's optimum for search engines (the best it can be), that each page receives a visit from the search engine spiders, and that each page eventually ranks high up in the search engine listings when words associated with the pages are typed into a search engine.

So will optimising my website take me to the top of the search engine listings?

Unfortunately not. Although if there aren't many websites competing in your market sector this is actually possible.

When ranking a website search engines take many more factors into consideration than the internal website optimisation. Search engines are now able to take external factors into account. To a degree, as a webmaster you have little control over many of the external factors.

One of these factors is the volume of websites that link to yours. This is known as your link popularity.