By Karl Young, special to Overdrive

Search engine optimization and its importance in business is growing every year. Defined as “a multidisciplinary activity that seeks to generate productive organic traffic from search engines via technically sound and connected sites by matching query intent with relevance and value,” search engine marketing activities are becoming ever more popular and crucial in a global competitive online market.

Organisations of all shapes and sizes want to ensure that their customers and audiences can access their website when searching for a product or service. This can be done using one of the many search engines on the web; each one has a different algorithm, which determines how and why a company’s website should be positioned on that search engine. For example, it is estimated that Google takes almost 200 signals into account when determining a website’s position. Quality content and high-quality “back link” profiles are two of the best ways a business can help itself move up the search engine rankings.