Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic for somebody who's just launched a web based business and wants to get "on top" of Google's search results. There are a couple of steps which you should take during the coding of your website and a couple simple steps you can do after your website is "done" (a website is never "done" without quotation marks).

In the olden days of pre-web 2.0, it was all up to you to make your website interesting for new visitors and updated to for returning visitors. Now you can have a community of members generating the content for you, which could be very powerful in terms of dynamic content. Now all you have to worry about is stimulating your community to keep generating content.

Getting back links is central to website promotion - the more backlinks you have the more likely people are to find you, and as well as people, search engine spiders will index your site, and increase you pagerank. Amongst others, one source of backlinks is from peoples blogs - why not comment on what they have to say, while leaving a link back to your site? One problem could be finding the right blogs!

After you've sorted out your keywords another major step in SEO is cultivating back links. Nothing gets you noticed faster by search engines than external links to your site from a few heavy weights. You know the ones I mean, those with a high page rank and zillions of eyeballs.
But how do you know who links to your site?

Any web guru would tell you that the first step to optimising your website is to manage your keywords - and when first planning and designing your site, it's key to know what keywords to use, and how to use them effectively. Here, lets investigate some of the tools available to help with keyword optimisation, and discuss strategies for managing keywords. First, what are keywords and why are they important?

So, you've finished your site, and are ready to promote it. Having a look around the web, and of course sites like this will give you stacks of ideas of what you can do to improve your search engine rankings - its time to do SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). The SEO strategies that you'll come across will describe ways to collect links from high rankings sites, through link exchanges or persuading others to link to you because of your content.

So, is Scientology a 'Dangerous Cult'? Was George Bush a 'Miserable Failure'? Or did Google's attempts to stop Google Bombs result in a miserable failure? Right now if you type 'Dangerous Cult' into your google search box, the number 1 result returned in the scientology home page - while I'm not interested in making a religious point, I am interested in questioning the supposedly 'democratic' principals of google's search engine rankings.

PageRank is an algorithm which analyses the relative 'weight' of a range of documents. Devised by Larry Page, it is a key factor in Google's search page result rankings. If nothing else it is a good guide for how well your website is doing (in Google's eyes) - the higher the pagerank, the more likely you are to appear in a search engine's results page.