You have just spent the last six weeks perfecting your site. You have the perfect set of pages to make that sale or become a famous writer or whatever you plan to do. There is just one problem - no one is looking at it.



This is your site. Okay, so it's not literally your site - it is just a picture but for the sake of argument it is your site. This, however, is your site on the World Wide Web.



Can you find it? It's there somewhere. To make matters worse that is just the other sites on the same subject as yours.

This is the problem that faces every owner of a new website. How can I draw attention to my site and get people to visit it? Until people visit the site they will not know how different it is to other sites.

Most visitors to a site will come from a search engine and in order to get traffic (that is human visitors) from search engines the search engines must return a link to your site as a search result. The higher up the list the engine returns your link the better the chances are that it will be clicked. To get to the top of the listings (or somewhere near) you must show that your site and it's pages are the most relevant pages tor return for searchers.

A search engine will only do well for so long as it is able to return results that are of interest to their users. If Bob Smith types "Hungry House Pub" and gets a page of links to "Harry's Pig and Snout Casino" he will rightly conclude that the search engine he is using is no use. So search engines are very critical of sites and are careful to work out which sites best match the search terms given.

There are a few things you can do to increase the ability of your site to impress search engines. Writing plenty of good quality content and linking your sites pages into a cohesive whole is a very good start. Using nothing but text based links it should be possible to get to every page on your site in a handful of clicks or less. This is where a site map would be of great use.

However to understand fully how to get the search engines to love your site you must understand how a search engine thinks. A search engine is pretty dumb - for example it can not read text in images and in fact can not appreciate arty images at all. When the search engine spiders your site for indexing (that means it looks at your site's pages to see what they are about) it does not run CSS, it ignores tables (on the whole) and it by passes javascript.

A search engine looks at your site's HTML and it starts at the top and ends at the bottom. While it is reading this stripped down version of your site it is looking for text and links. Text is something a search engine understands. For example if the words "search engine" crop up on a regular basis in my text then there is a good chance that my text is about search engines.

However, there is another problem. If two pages both contain text about search engines which text is the more useful? Which one is more likely to be true which is measured by the authority of the page)?

Starting with Google search engines start paying attention to links. Links now count as votes for other pages and a vote from an authoritative page is worth more than a vote from a worthless page. Let's look at that.



Here we have your site again but this time seen within the context of links to and from other pages. This is how the leading search engines think about your site and all the pages within it. The more links and the great the authority of those links that point to your pages the better.

Links do two things for you. First they enable visitors to the other website to find your site and second they count as a vote towards the page they point to meaning that the page is more likely to be found within the first few pages of a search results listing.

But if you look again at the image you will see a "billy no mates" in the bottom right hand corner. With no links coming in and none going out this site is likely to never be considered of any value at all and so, even if it had the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, no one would ever see it.

Also within the diagram are sites shown in dark gray. These are sites that search engines consider to be bad neighbourhoods. From a search engine point of view these are sites that game the system and try to commit fraud to improve their position in search results far beyond the quality they provide. Linking to them can actually hurt your relevancy because you are voting for "bad sites".

It does not take a great genius to see that there is an optimal configuration for a good site whereby the site gets the most traffic as a result. The art of optimising a site has become known as SEO or search engine optimisation. Many people make many claims about it and many of those may use or consider using methods that can hurt your future standing.

I'll end this introduction with some links to further information:

Some SEO Basics and Alexa Rank Mistakes - more detail and more diagrams by Lord Matt, Super Geek (me).
ProBlogger.net - SEO
SEO - Review :: Recover from the sand box again by me
Quality Link Building by Gregg M. Terry
Link popularity, wikipedia.org
the importance of title tags in search engine optimization, ProBlogger.net