Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a general term that encompasses the way in which a web page is manipulated in order to appear as high up as possible on the listings of web pages provided by search engines.

This encompasses the manipulation of a very wide range of factors in order that a particular page is considered to be the most relevant for a particular search term. These factors can run into in excess of 100 Including:

• the presence of the search term on the page;
• additional instances of the term as text
• teh term as an alt text
• is the term part of the description
• within the H1, H2 or H3
• is it part of the domain name
• is it a generic term or a trade name
• is it in the file name
• relevance of the page which is a function of the number and relevance of pages that in turn link to that page;
• How relevant the links coming in to the page are both as a function of the content on the originating page and the text within the link
• Is the web site on DMOZ (Open Directory Project)
• The age of the domain name
• How long the content has been online
• Quality of the content - broken links
• Accessibility
• Frequency of updates to the web site
• Associated terms on the web page (see Google sets)
• size of web page - amount of text
• sizeof web site
• relevance to country of search - .co.uk or .com
• duplicate content - does the content appear anywhere else on the web

A very important consideration when doing SEO is to keep in mind the task that faces the search engine.

Google has some 8 billion web pages which it can apparently index almost instantly. In doing this it must have preprocessed the elements of content within the web pages it indexes so that it can list these pages based on that preprocessed information.

The pre-processing or parsing of web page information is therefore very important, equally it can do this relatively speaking at its leisure.

What does the search engine spider or robot see?

Try this tool: www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi obviously this is a generic idea of what a spider will see and record for your web page - see the Google cache also for your web page.