Website SEO is a simple step by step process which must allow a website, or a web page to achieve certain objectives. The process will be different for a new business, compared to an already established business, looking to employ SEO to generate more business for the first time. For the purposes of this discussion, we are considering a new, startup business that has chosen the market niche in which it is going to compete. The following steps/objectives have to be achieved in the following order:

1. Get indexed on Google. If a page or site is not indexed on Google, nobody will find it. The "traditional" approach to getting a site or page indexed is to submit it to Google, or any of the other search engines. However, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the infamous Google Sandbox, this can actually delay a page being indexed. Accepted wisdom amongst internet marketers seems to be that creating links back to your pages from authority, or well ranked pages is usually a quicker. Linking a video or an RSS feed back to your page is faster still. The overriding objective of getting indexed is usually getting indexed as fast as possible. This can then allow the following steps to happen.

2. Get Found on Google. By this I mean that once a page or site is indexed, it is essential for that page to be found amongst the searches for a given (ideally traffic generating) search term on what are termed the SERPS (search engine results pages).

3. Get ranked on Google. By this I mean taking the necessary actions that your page moves up the rankings in the SERPS to a position where it will show in the top 10 search results for your chosen search term. As a result of this improvement in your SERPS position, your page is being seen by searchers looking for your chosen search term.

4. Move to the top of the SERPS pages. Having achieved a page 1 ranking in the SERPS every marketer's ambition is to top the rankings and achieve position number 1 in the SERPS.

5. Dominate the SERPS. The most successful internet marketers don't work towards getting the number one position only. Their objective is to completely dominate the SERPS for their chosen search term, effectively locking out the competition and maximising traffic from searchers for their chosen search term Imagine that you have SERPS position 1 and the traffic that generates. Now imagine if the top 5 or 10 SERPS results showing on Google all pointed to your pages or product. Imagine how that would multiply your traffic. However, it is extremely difficult to do, as Google seeks to offer the searcher a variety of options from which to choose, so often different strategies have to be employed, for instance video, RSS feeds, articles reciprocal and 3 way linking etc.

So the above is the goal of our SEO process. In some cases, traffic and resulting turnover objectives may be hit before total domination is achieved and in other cases, total domination of the SERPS may simply not be within our resources. A compromise strategy will almost always be employed, whereby a trade off between the effort to achieve the page ranking will be considered in relation to the expected results from that ranking. In plain English - it may be easier to achieve a host of Number 8 pages to get our traffic, than it would be to get a few pages to number 1 to achieve our traffic objectives. So, we might be reaching for the stars, but might have to accept the moon along the way!