A bit blurry but we hope you can see the text above the red line, if not it says "About 126,000,000 results (0.11 seconds)" for the search term "Website Design".

What can we tell from this?

Google usually only displays 10 organic search results per page, organic results are websites who are there on merit, have been optimised and deemed most relevant to the search term entered by you.

You may see some other results above the organic results, these are usually in a slightly darker box which says "Ads" in the top left corner, you need to look hard to see it sometimes, but these are paid adverts and in no way reflect the best sites on offer, in fact we usually ignore them when searching preferring to use the organic links instead.

There is only one way that any website design company can guarantee you a place in the top 30 and that is by placing one of the ads mentioned above, no doubt some if not all of you have had the phone calls from companies stating they want to put your website on the front page of Google, don't be fooled by this, this is not SEO, they are just placing an advert for you and charging you money to do so, anyone can do this, even you, we may discuss this in later posts.

As we have stated above, Google and most other search engines use the same type of format and display 10 organic results per page, meaning if you are going to get noticed on the internet, the best chance of doing so is to be in the top 30 results, or first three pages. Now trying to get onto the first three pages or the top 30 out of 129,000,00 is a monumental task.

So far we know how to find out how many websites come up in the search results, so we have an idea of how many we are competing with but we haven't touched on SEO as such, just given you information to show just how difficult reaching these results will be.

1. Search Engine Optimisation starts with your choice of web address, most people like the idea of the company name as the web address such as www.joebloggs.com but is it a good idea when considering SEO, although it nice and easy for the website designer to obtain a web address with your company name, its not really the best idea when it comes to SEO.

As an example, joebloggs.com sells metal washers, so the ideal search term joebloggs wants to be found in the search engines for would be "Metal Washers", so variations such as metalwashers.com, metalwashers.co.uk, metalwashers.eu etc etc would be much more relevant to the search engines and help joebloggs be found for that search term and the products they sell.

The exception to this way of thinking would be a well known company, example Google gets found for the search term Google obviously.

As with the image before the text above the red line says "About 316,000 results (0.15 seconds)".

Notice how the number of results have dramatically reduced, making the job of reaching the top 30 more realistic and the search term is ideal for the product the company is selling.

2. Meta Tags

These are extremely important to search engine optimisation, although some are more important than others.

Meta tags are found at the start of the code for a website and are invisible to the visitor but visible to the search engines, the three tags we will discuss here are Title, Description and Keywords.

The Title, Description & Keyword tag on the joebloggs site would looks something like this

<title>Metal Washers - Joe bloggs</title>

<meta name="Description" content="Metal Washers, visit Joe bloggs for top quality, excellent service and fast delivery"/>

<meta name="Keywords" content="Metal Washers"/>

Above you will see the pattern, "Metal Washers is the first phrase in the three tags, other words or phrases can be included but it is important to have your main word or phrase first.

These are not the only tags that can be used but are the main ones which should be included in all websites.

There should be at least a part of the title tag displayed in the tab in the browser when open and on your website.

To find out if your website designer has included the tags, open a browser, we are using Firefox for this example, surf to your website, click on View in the top bar then click on Page Source, this varies a bit in other browsers but it should show your page with lots of code including your tags at the top, this is what the search engines see, not all the beautiful pictures your visitors see.

3. Content

The first paragraph of text on your website should include the search term you have chosen for your main word or phrase, the example would be Metal Washers and could look something like the one below.

Metal Washers at Joe Bloggs, blah blah blah etc.

Most search engines place more relevance on your main phrase if it is included at the beginning or in the first paragraph of text.

We sincerely hope this has helped you understand a bit about Search Engine Optimisatioon (SEO) and has not been too long winded.

Please understand that SEO is not an exact science and many factors influence they way search engines rank your website, we have only touched on the surface here, there are many more factors and hours of work in optimising a website properly, probably many more than in designing one.

That's why at Wizard Web Design we include SEO in all of our website packages and our results speak for themselves, see below for some amazing statistics on the websites we have created already, check them yourself, type the search term listed below for each website into your browser and see if what we are saying is true.