HAVE you ever wondered why nobody is visiting your website? You have gone to a lot of effort to choose a web design company who have produced a beautiful website. It’s all-singing and dancing with great flash animation and videos.

You are publishing great articles and have one of the best-value products around. It is exactly how you envisioned it, but nobody beyond your own employees and family have ever seen it. Why?

Have you considered search engine optimisation (SEO)? As an industry, SEO is still relatively young with its history dating back to only 2001.

SEO is the practice of gaining high rankings for your website through chosen keywords and phrases within the organic results.

If aligned correctly with a good linking campaign it will result in first-page placement within Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How do I know which keywords to target for my business? Your keywords are derived firstly from your products and services and then refined to reflect what search engine users are actually searching for, which will, if optimised correctly, bring highly-targeted visitors to your website ready to buy.

Competition for your products and services can be huge, but that does not mean to say you cannot compete. A good SEO can bring a steady flow of visitors to your website within a matter of months.

If you run an e-commerce website, a flow of targeted visitors will be at the root of why you have a web presence to begin with.

SEO as a practice has diversified into separate disciplines covering a whole array of different marketing techniques – from working with the raw code of your website to understanding and translating Analytics, dissecting and understanding link profiles and considering the hundreds of ranking factors that will gain a competitive edge.

Understanding how your website is presented to search engines is vital. There are occasions when your website has duplicate content issues or you have inadvertently blocked your website from being indexed.

The structure of your website plays a role in which way your website’s content will be presented within the search engines results. The wrong structure can lead to not having all of your websites content indexed.

It is the job of SEO to address all potential technical issues that may be facing your websites indexation within search engines, along with maximising the exposure for your chosen keywords and phrases.

:: Dean Cruddace is managing director of Sunderland search engine optimisation firm SEO Begin