As more Jamaicans and companies establish an online presence, some will wonder about the inner workings of SEO as the end result of good SEO is fairly straightforward to understand.

The higher a website ranks in the results of a search for a particular word or phrase, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.

SEO is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to a website, and the studies have proved this true.

A recent U.S. survey of 13,000 web users by BurstMedia.Com found that more than 56 per cent of respondents use search engines to get to web destinations.

Already there are many websites going after Jamaica - related words and phrases, and the competition will get even more intense as there are so many new Jamaica-related websites being launched weekly.

WARNINGS

Before you try or pay someone to try to get a ranking for your website, here are a few warnings:

Stay away from bulk submission services and software that promise to list your site in thousands (and sometimes 'millions') of search engines and directories.

Ultimately, there are 20 or 30 engines, portals and directories that you should be concerned about being listed on, and of those, probably five or six of them will end up giving you 75 per cent (or more) of your search traffic.

Meta tags are not the 'secret' to achieving high rankings.  A few years ago, stuffing your website with dozens of meta tags was a sure way to high search engine rankings.  Not so any more, as most major search engines now ignore these tags completely.

Don't re-submit your website constantly.  Some do this because they believe it will help them get better rankings.

On the contrary, these repeated submissions could result in your site being banned and permanently excluded from some search engines.

If your website looks good, this isn't a guarantee that it will rank well.  There are many factors that are used by engines to rank sites and the design or layout of a site is not one of them.  Additionally, the more complex the site gets with Flash links, image maps, java navigation bars, drop-down menu links and more, the greater the likelihood that it will not do well for rankings.

Once you achieve a good ranking, it isn't necessarily 'yours for life'.  The search engines are constantly changing their methods of ranking websites, and with new websites being launched with increasing frequency, gaining and maintaining search engine rankings is a constant battle.

WAR ON TERRORISM GOES ONLINE?

Has the Internet become the battleground for the United States or United Kingdom-sponsored war on terrorism?

News reports indicate that a number of Al-Qaeda-affiliated websites have gone offline in recent times, and that British security agencies may be at the root of this.

It's likely that these sites were hosted on U.K. servers or registered through U.K. registrars; hence it would be an easy 'fix' for them to be taken offline in the interest of 'national security'.

The Internet by nature is fluid though, so it's possible to have alternate sites set up elsewhere in the world in hours, even minutes.

Because of this, the U.S., or U.K. Governments may soon find themselves hard-pressed to actually win this war online.

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