By publishing your site with bad copy, or even good but irrelevant content, it will not just be your search engine ranking that fall but your bottom line too. Indeed even florid or overly technical copy can hide important and relevant content from your audience.

Naturally, we all want our sites to be placed in the number one slot but understanding how search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing read your site’s text can be the key to bringing the right content to the right audience.

Although the major search engines closely guard their methods and techniques for indexing and sorting website content there are ways to examine your website’s search performance.

When search engines index a site they extract specific terms which they understand to be the most relevant to that page; this process is called “Term Extraction”. But, as with any technology, they can sometimes make mistakes. They can, and often do, misunderstand the importance or relevance of a piece of content and, consequently, associate search terms with irrelevant content.

Understanding which terms are extracted from your site and the relative importance search engines assign them allows you to alter the copy to target the audiences you wish.

As with most online technologies there are any number of services that perform the same service and search term extraction is no exception. Many sites and applications claim to perform accurate search engine term extraction, some for a price, but below are two free services which are invaluable to any website owner. While these may never be completely accurate they can provide you with some understanding of the performance of your site’s copy.

The Seattle-based SEO company SEOmoz provides a simple, and free, SEO “Term Extractor.” By submitting a link to page you want to test, the site ranks the terms, phrases and links found in the text according to their probable relevance to one another. This then builds a picture of the most and least important terms associated with that page.

SEOmoz also has a rather nice free Beginners Guide to SEO.

While SEOmoz’s Term Extractor is useful for sites that already exist, SEO Tool’s, rather verbose, “Yahoo! Keyword Phrase Term Extraction” is a useful SEO tool for bloggers. Instead of examining the entire site the The Keyword Phrase Term Extraction tool uses Yahoo’s! search index to glean the most relevant words from a body of text.

For example, this page tests well for the terms “accurate search engine,” and “search engines index” but poorly for words like “audience” or “Yahoo!” Using this information I could improve the page’s ranking with the latter terms by providing more content and links about them.

These tools may not be completely accurate they certainly don’t guarantee that relevant content will be placed first on search engines. A site’s search results placement depends on many factors, some even beyond your control. But these sites can give a valuable impression of how to improve your site’s content so it has the best chance of obtaining that coveted top spot.

In my former days as a web developer, maintaining sites to be search engine compliant the one task that occupied the most of our time. Back in the nascent days of SEO we were using basic tools and our own, sometimes, tacit knowledge of SEO to maintain our client sites. But despite the speed that comes with being overly-familiar with a site’s code, ensuring a site was optimised for both search engines and users was the web equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge.

Thankfully nowadays there are hundreds of tools available for small to medium businesses to ensure their sites are optimised for the web. If fact there is a confusingly large array of sites and applications that claim they can get you to “the top position on Google.” Search for SEO on Google and your browser window will be consumed by ads inviting you to see their “amazing results” and promising “Guaranteed Rankings.”

From free trials to hundreds per month these ads offer a dizzying list of promises and testimonials but before you sign up there are a few thing you can do yourself to examine your site’s SEO credentials.

Optimising your site’s code may not directly influence your search result ranking but it will provide your site with the best change at being seen by the largest number of visitors.

Your first step in optimising your site should be www.totalvalidator.com. This site offers a free and powerful service that examines your site and suggests the necessary changes that need to be made to optimise your code for search engines and visitors.

According to the Total Validator site “Search engine robots/spiders are very fussy and will not search or index some or all of a site if they come across invalid HTML. So if you want to be properly listed you need to be sure your HTML is valid” (our links).

Testing your site using Total Validator is straightforward and quick, all you have to do is go to their homepage and enter your site address.

In addition, one of the easiest to use validation tools is, simply called, Html Validator. Html Validator is a simple addon for the Firefox web browser. This addon places a small box at the bottom of your screen that tells you the number and type of errors on the page. It also explains the errors on the site and tells you how to remove them.

These online tools will not correct any errors on your site they will tell you where your site is falling down and how it can be improved.

Terms like ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ might sound overly technical but they needn’t be. Authoring valid code is simply a matter of practice (and, in my experience is benefited from having a lot of fresh coffee at hand). If you don’t have access to your website or you aren’t comfortable with editing your site’s code then raise your site validation errors with your web-development company or have a look at commissioning a freelance web-developer.

While SEO maintenance may be the task that never ends it is not an entirely thankless job. Valid code and interesting content will benefit your search engine rankings and, in time, deliver greater traffic to your site.

According to the Hub’s Director of Marketing and Strategy, Dr. Stephen Brennan, by not engaging with digital technologies Irish businesses Irish businesses are failing to promote themselves to new customers.

Dr Brennan was speaking at the launch of the WebActivate Project, an initiative designed to educate and promote digital technologies to Irish businesses. The project, which starts in August, is currently looking for willing trainees and businesses.

The project is open to Participants and Businesses. Participants can be any private individual, preferably with a diploma or degree or people with some tech skills. These participants will be trained in August 2010 in web development skills over six weeks. They will then be placed with businesses to apply their new-found skills. According to the programme site applicants must be registered with their Local Employment Service.

Businesses who apply to the project will begin taking in trained participants from September. These participants will spend three months with the company applying their technical skills. The scheme is free of charge to businesses. Businesses can apply to the project here.

More information can be found at the WebActivate Project’s website.

It used to be said that there was SEO value in creating or maintain a Wikipedia or public social networking page. Any links placed on these sites would not be indexed by Google and due to their public nature and constant need for updating they would just be an unnecessary drain on resources. But now that the major search engines are indexing user tweets and integrating them user searches, this SEO-lite service is being reconsidered as a possible SEO service in disguise.

SEO value come from being included in search engine results-these may not be long-term gains but can help in breaking news or important situations.

Blogging in January 2009, before Twitter announced it was providing Bing and Google access to its entire database, Sitepoint’s SEO expert, Mihaela Lica, postulated that Twitter’s SEO value had been underestimated. According to Lica, “Optimizing a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. ‘ Creating’ is ‘onsite SEO.’ ‘Promoting’ is ‘offsite SEO.’”

The problem with using the social web to drive traffic to your site is that the social networking sites prevent search engines from reading a link on their sites as a recommendation. By automatically adding the simple rel=“nofollow” code to posted links these sites can stop search engines from seeing those links as recommendations.

Because of this Twitter does not offer any direct SEO value. But as Mike Dobbs from Mashable points out the inclusion of user Tweets in Google and Bing searches provides web developers and website owners with new avenues for site promotion.

Indeed engaging with the social web can have added, although unseen, SEO value – a multiplicative effect. The theory goes that if you post a link to your or another site you have the opportunity to spread that link to your audience. But if that link is then retweeted, reported or otherwise shared the link can then be seen by those users’ followers and those users then have the same opportunity to further share the link.

Since the last 2009 user updates have been listed on all major search engines. Google and Bing reportedly paid $25M to access Twitter’s “firehose” of tweets.

But with all the major search engines and, indeed, the Library of Congress being given access to Twitter’s backlog of Tweets, having and maintaining a Twitter account can be beneficial to your search engine placement but your reputation.

The At Institute’s latest figures show that Google is still the most popular site for search, with an average user base of over 92%. Bing is second with about 2% of the market while Yahoo! trails in third with just over 1% of the market. Smaller and regional search engines make up the remaining market share.

The study was conducted on user browsing habits from four major European economies, France, Spain, the UK and Germany during the month of May.

While the market share remained relatively stable compared to the previous month the results show a slight fall in share by Google in the UK and Germany although this was offset by gains in Spain and France. Microsoft’s Bing market share fell slightly in the month-on-month analysis from just over 2% to just below 2%.

There was no change in Yahoo!’s market share which remained at under 1.5%.

Google has been gradually gaining market share at the expense of Yahoo! and Bing in the six months from January. These gains may come as a result of the increasing use of Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers both of which use Google search by default.