SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of enabling your website to be found by potential customers looking on search engines for the product or service that you provide.

Google is the most well known of these search engines and by far the most popular, however there are others including Bing, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves to name but a few.

FoodSafe UK, Ltd

FoodSafe UK are food hygiene specialists and training providers based in Kingston upon Hull, managing director Ian Mitchell approached the Graphic Assembly early last year to build the FoodSafe website and a high Google ranking was very much on his mind.

My role in this was firstly to optimise the website code to make it very search engine friendly and as Ian wrote most of his own copy to advise on keyword relevancy and placement. Ian on the other hand set about building a high quality link network and aggresively marketing his business both online and offline.

The keyword focus on this project was for the term "food hygiene" now if you type this into Google, Google returns a massive 9,190,000 results so basically to get onto page one, the top ten results you have to beat the other 9,189,990 sites competing for a top ten slot.

Impossible for such a young site you might say, well yes it is but when you narrow this search to "food hygiene Hull" Google returns 59,900 results, this localisation greatly narrows the results and is an important factor to remember when dealing with SEO.

The results are still pretty high but achievable as you can see if you try doing a Google search yourself, you will find FoodSafe UK sitting very pretty on page one in sixth position, not bad at all for a website less than a year old.

The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’ which refers to the number one followed by one hundred zeroes. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organise the immense amount of information available on the web.