Riding on a multi million dollar marketing budget, Microsoft have launched their new search engine – Bing – rumoured to be a replacement to Live Search. Currently in beta, this new challenger for the top spot is certainly pleasing on the eye. With appealing background graphics and muted tones it will probably enjoy good acceptance in the broader community, but will that be enough to dominate the search engine space?

With a web site you need to think of every page as being a front page. You don’t control which page a reader will access first and in terms of marketing you don’t want visitors to come through the front door. You want them to go directly to the page that has the information they want.

Getting your website noticed by the search engines is very easy. All you really need to do is make sure that at lease one other website, anywhere, has a link to yours. That’s it. Sooner or later your site will be discovered and recorded in the archives. Unfortunately, that’s not enough. Without a comprehensive strategy for web optimisation, your site will be listed so far down the list it will be lost in obscurity amongst the millions of web sites fighting for attention.

The basic idea with page optimisation is to make your site easy for the search engine “spiders” to understand. The index created by these search engine “bots” will be used to ascertain the relevance of your site in terms of the search terms requested by their users.

The following points give a brief overview of good search engine strategies that will help to improve your search engine result position.

When I speak to small business owners about web design I invariably hear about how they, or someone they know got burned by the web designer. They may have even formed the opinion that the web site was an expensive waste of money. Unfortunately this is all too common and the reason is generally, the web designer got it wrong!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be broken down into two broad areas. Off Page and On Page. Off page optimisation basically concerns itself with links back to your site, where they came from and how they are established. On Page optimisation covers the things you can do to the pages in your web site to make them easier for search engines to read them and evaluate them as being a credible and important resource.

– A Quick Guide 

A quick "How To" on starting up an an AdWords account. By no means exhaustive but it will help you look in the right direction.