1. Learning it from traditional media such as TV, print, radio, brochures, business cards etc.


2. Link from another website


3. Recommended by someone


4. Found using a Search Engine (SE) such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc.

1. HTML code optimisation:
   The first stage is the checking, and re-writing if necessary, of navigation and content structures on your website. SEs do not understand objects such as images, Flash, JavaScript etc. They will simply ignore them. There is no point proceeding any further if the SE cannot understand what it is seeing.
   Programmers undertake this category of SEO. A deep understanding of current web coding standards and techniques is necessary. Software packages often produce very poor results, and it usually takes a lot of human intervention to ensure optimum accessibility.


2. Content tailoring:
   A SE rates web pages according to their relevancy given a set of keywords. You must therefore tailor your content with these keywords in mind at all times. Fundamental to determining which keywords are relevant is an understanding of your target market. You must know the typical questions they ask to
   
   
   find answers. There are websites such as WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) that can help you to determine commonly used keywords.
   
   
   Remember: this is not a race to see how many keywords can fill the page. There is an optimum keyword density. Too dense and it is considered stuffing or spamming - you will be penalised. Too little, and you are not considered an authoritative source. Choosing to hone in on a specific set of keywords per page is also prudent. You are not trying to optimise for everybody on the Internet - only those who ask a specific question.


3. Cutting-edge optimisation:
   SEs use algorithms that are proprietary secrets and continually evolve over time. Categories 1 and 2 focus on making your website accessible to SEs and ensuring you have high quality content. These are well-established principles guaranteed to improve your rankings - regardless of how the SE algorithms advance.
   
   
   To give their clients an advantage, SEO practitioners can sometimes try to abuse the SE algorithms. They may take advantage of loopholes or shady methods.
   A simple example is ‘stuffing' a page with invisible text - white text on a white background. This is invisible to humans, but SEs used to index this content. If taken one-step further by stuffing the page with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it becomes ‘spamming'. SEs are smarter today and will notice these devious tricks. Websites using them will be heavily penalised.
   
   
   Category 3 is a moving target - and hence carries risk if poorly executed. What works today is innovative, but may be heavily penalised in the future once people abuse it to skew results. You should always be wary of introducing any initiatives that fall into this category.

About the Author

Samer Shami is the Client Advisor for Communicat Business Solutions. His role within the company is to help companies increase sales and decrease costs by improving the latent potential hidden within the Internet.