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Avril gained a Diploma in Personnel Management at Teesside University (then Teesside Polytechnic) and worked for many years in human resources.  She began her freelance writing career in 1990, focusing mainly on business opportunities and marketing, but covering numerous other subjects also as her writing samples reveal.

She is an eBay PowerSeller and editor of a leading UK magazine for people selling on eBay.

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Keyword: 'SEO'

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation - And How It Benefits Your Online Business

by Avril Harper

SEO is the acronym for one of the most important features of running an online business; it stands for 'Search Engine Optimisation', or 'Search Engine Optimization', depending on where you live and work.

And that's about as complicated as SEO ever gets to be, despite many marketing newcomers thinking search engine optimisation is something only the experts do, and then only after many years of working online.

In fact, SEO is a very simple concept, anyone can do it, even a complete internet novice.

SEO is basically a technique used to alert search engines like Google to three main things:

(i) The presence of a specific website.

(ii) The main theme associated with that website.

(iii) The benefits of listing that website high in search engine returns.

Among other things, effective SEO means providing valuable content at your website and keeping the site up-to-date and free from errors and broken links. This is sometimes termed 'On Site SEO' and it involves creating articles and titles, also hyperlinks and images at the site, based on words resembling those most frequently keyed into search engines to find sites similar to your own. Conversely, 'Off Site SEO' typically means placing active links on other people's websites that lead back to your own. They're called 'backlinks' and the implication is, if a high quality website links back to your site, what Google terms as providing a 'vote' for you, this helps your business grow higher in search engine returns.

So how does the newbie marketer get started with SEO? Basically he:

* Identifies keywords used by people searching online to locate websites similar to his own. So if he's selling Titanic Memorabilia, he'll want his site to rank high in search engines when someone searches for memorabilia for the ill-fated liner. So his first task is to determine what words people actually key into search engines to locate such products. Having done so, he'll find 'Titanic Posters' and 'Titanic Memorabilia' are suitable keywords to search engine optimise a site selling Titanic memorabilia. He then researches those keywords and numerous others for popularity (number of searches made over a specific period), also competition (number of sites seeking high search engine placement for similar terms).

* Activates On Site SEO Tasks. The webmaster typically builds website pages based on specific keywords that are highly popular but not overly-competitive. These words will be used sparingly in titles and content, page descriptions and headings, also in the site's domain name and url suffixes. The aim is to get search engines to spot the similarity between words used at the site and those keyed into search engines.

* Activates Off Site SEO Tasks. Backlinks from sites respected by Google, and given what's called 'High PageRank', are a measure of the reputation and reliability of the destination site, and that's why many search engine optimisation experts consider link building a very important part of the SEO process.

So now you know search engine optimisation is a pretty ordinary process with potentially extraordinary effects on how high your site ranks in search engine returns.