Search Engine Optimization (SEO) employs a number of techniques used to improve the ranking of your website listing in search engines like Google, Yahoo Windows Live, AOL and others. It is a fact that greater than 80% of Internet users use search engines to find services, products and information on the Internet. If your site is not listed with search engines like Google and Yahoo, it is unlikely that you will be able to attract potential customers to your website.

Designing your site to be listed highly (or "ranked") on search engines is not an artform...in fact, it is an exact science: a science in which Swordfish Labs has proven its expertise.

Many misinformed Internet authorities will tout the importance of Keywords (a series of comma-separated words and phrases that describe your business or website; built into the HTML coding of your webpage) over all else. Keywords are one of the properties that describe your site to the search engines, and while the selection and placement of a proper set of Keywords is quite important, often times they are the only emphasis of some developers in "optimizing" a website. There a great many other factors that search engines like Google use to determine the ranking (positioning) your website deserves on their search engine.

The exact formula for search engine success, while not a trade secret by any stretch of the imagination, is quite in-depth. So much so, in fact, that doctoral theses and volumes of several hundred pages have been written on the subject; none of which covering the entirety of the formula nor offering a guaranteed recipe for search engine bliss!

To spare the everyday website owner the agony of mathematical search engine optimization, the following are some of the key elements in obtaining search engine ranking:

• Content, Content, Content. Search engines actually read the text on your web pages and perform (among other things) something called a "Hermetic Frequency", or count of the number of appearances of words and phrases. therefore, it is imperative that if you plan to sell widgets online, a great deal of the text on your website actually refers to...you guessed it...widgets.
• Develop effective Keywords that accurately describe the intention of the website.
• Use Titles for each page that reflect the content on the page. A page full of brown widgets should likely have a title like "Brown Widgets".
• Effectively using Hyperlinks (web links) to link your site to others with relevant and similar content as well as other relevant content on your own site.