Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become a buzz-word in the business community and viewed by some as being a black art based on voodoo. There are also many people in the community who believe that SEO is an absolute necessity when undertaking an online project, requiring significant investment and resource to position a site on the first page of a search engine's results. This belief is a myth, writes James Varga.

First of all, let's put this into perspective. Search engines (such as Google) spend an incredible amount of time and energy on effectively cataloguing pages of real content. Their entire business is based on appropriate, real results. Contradictory to this effort are the SEO companies, many of which use black hat (aka black art) methods for positioning pages higher than the competition. This results in a direct conflict between the two. Who's going to win - those controlling the categorisation of content or those trying to manipulate that categorisation?

There are no secrets concerning the process of Search Engine Optimisation, it is simply the categorisation of content. The better structured, appropriate and concise the content - the better the SEO result. At lightershade, we have assisted many clients who initially listed SEO as a core part of their requirements without ever knowing what it meant. On a case by case basis, we have been able to competitively position sites higher on the search engine by focusing on a few key principles. These are:

• Well written, concise and structured content will be more effective
• Links to and from pages reflect relevance - the more links the more relevance
• Proper descriptions of the content on page links, URLs and page titles result in better categorisation
• Actively updated sites offer more diverse information
• Pages have a message, focus on that message

Imagine for a moment that there is a site promoting a charity event. The content of this page should describe the event, who it's for and why it's happening. Linking to this page of content from other pages and sites indicate how important it is. Including the subject or topic in the page title and url helps the search engine to identify what its about. Writing clean concise content removes any confusion with other topics or subjects. That's it - you have a good page of content. Remember, the more specific the page, the higher the chance of someone looking for that specific page. It's as simple as that.

Following these simple principles will result in a fantastic SEO result, maybe not as good as paying someone to help you, but at least 80% of what you could ever expect. More importantly the investment is £0.00 when you consider that you should be following these simple principles anyway - whether for users visiting your site or search engines categorising it.

Once each page of your online proposition follows these principles then you can focus on more specific techniques of SEO. More specific techniques consist of including meta keywords and descriptions, targeted content, link bait and of course the 'black hat' methods. Then there is of course paid advertising such as Google Adwords.

Start with the basics - there's no point in paying someone to do what you should be doing anyway.

About the author
James Varga is agency director of lightershade.