Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a critical component of most websites, as just about everybody who uses the internet to search for something will use a search engine.

Search engines run software programs (called ‘bots’) that effectively download most of the websites on the internet. From there they will be classified by complex algorithms to determine what, if any, search results they will appear in.

Basic SEO simply involves making sure your website can be indexed effectively by the search bots. I often see websites built by professionals that offer nothing to the search bot, and sometimes even block its progress, ensuring no presence on the search engine results pages.

So the first step is to ensure your website is search engine friendly. After that, you can go further and target specific key words and key phrases in your website, and try to appear in the results pages for those. This is where SEO becomes and art and a science.

A basic website is just a collection of files. They often include photo files (usually jpeg) and web pages (often html), as well as many others. When you visit a website with your computer, the files are downloaded from a remote computer to your computer so you can see them. The remote computer, which could be located anywhere in the world, hosts these files and serves them upon request. The recurring hosting fee that you pay when you have a website is effectively rental for the space that your website occupies on the host computer.