Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is defined as ‘the process of improving ranking in search engine results’, writes Berry Adams in the Belfast Telegraph.

When search engines first appeared on the scene in the 1990’s to help people make sense of the exponential growth of websites, it suddenly became important to show up first in these search engine results pages.

Savvy entrepreneurs quickly figured out how search engines worked and what a website needed to rank first, and the dark art of SEO was born.

Search Engines, and consequently the art of optimising websites for search results, have changed significantly since the first beginnings of web search, when the Internet was primarily dominated by simplistic pieces of software that crawled the world wide web and matched words found on websites to search terms entered by Internet users. Whether or not that site was actually useful and relevant for the user’s query didn’t matter too much back then.

Today, matching keywords is still important, but many other factors such as quality links, frequently updated content and (it is assumed) hundreds of other factors play a role in how well a site is ranked in the search engines. That means there are many measures you can take to show your site in a favourable light.