Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is gaining increasing importance on the marketing professional's agenda as a natural development of Internet Marketing.

The history of the Internet shows that in the early days just having a website was enough. Then it became necessary that these also looked good and then functioned well. It still remains an imperative that there is a marriage between good design and good site navigation; That the visitor is only ever two clicks away from where they want to be on the site.

However, these fundamentals are now not enough to ensure that your site will be found among the myriad of sites and web pages available to the surfer.

Consequently more and more effort is being put into improving the chances of being found by using SEO techniques. Inevitably one tends to talk about Google rankings in this context (but don't forget the importance of Yahoo and MSN) and it is generally believed that no-one (including Google's own employees) know all of the supposed 200+ alogrithms that evaluate the ranking of a particlular website. 

Regardless of this, through many people's efforts and much trial and error, there are widely recognised techniques and processes that can be used to achieve better rankings - given the time. In reality this takes effort and know-how, an upfront intial investment and then ongoing and regular input before results will be seen. This is no quick fix and anyone who says otherwise is likely to be looking to make a fast buck for themselves rather than a positive return on investment for their clients!