I recently received a broadcast message from a friend proudly announcing that their site had reached number 2 in the Google search results for their chosen keyword.

On the surface, this sounds like a great achievement, but was it the right achievement?

Let me explain…

For most people, search engine optimisation (SEO) is somewhat of a black art – they know they need to address it in order to get the most free traffic they possibly can, but they really have no clue what it really is or how to do it.

In essence, SEO is about helping the search engines understand that you have quality content on the topics (keywords) that you want to be found for. After all, the search engines really just want to give people the most relevant, high quality content they can for the term the user searched on – your aim is to convince them that content is yours (so that they will send you targeted web traffic).