What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a website from search engines. SEO service providers consider how search engines work and what web surfers search for. Optimizing a website mainly consist of two activities; HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) code editing and the content of the website. These two activities are carried out in order to increase the website relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Because search engine optimization (SEO) may require changes to HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. Usually, this is referred to as a “search engine friendly” or “search engine ready” design and could involve the design of menus, content management systems, shopping carts, etc. On the other hand, editing and creating the website content in an SEO format could be referred to as “traffic targeted content”.

The truth about SEO is that even if you do all things necessary to get top ratings on the search engines results are not guaranteed. However, neglect a basic rule and a negative impact is assuredly guaranteed. Further, aiming to reach top thirty results in Google for a particular keyword is achievable, trying to be number one for ten keywords in five different search engines is impossible.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is considered the technical part of web marketing. Not only it improves the promotion results of a website but it also requires at least a basic understanding of HTML. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

SEO is not by any means a form of advertising, although it increases traffic to your website. You can participate in paid search results for given keywords, however the fundamental idea behind SEO is to achieve top search engine ranking because your website is relevant to a particular search term.

Several studies show that very few surfers will ever look past the second page of search results. This means that if your website is not well optimized for targeted keywords very few surfers will ever see your website. Statistically shown that clicks on results #1 - #4 are equal to all the clicks on results #5 - #1000!!!

How do search engines work?
It is important to distinguish the difference between how humans view web pages verse how search engines do. The former enjoys the beauty of the design, the music of the site, the movies displayed and of course the text content presented. Unlike humans search engines are text driven. Simplified, search engines crawl the web looking for particular elements in a site mainly text. This will give the search engines an idea about that the site is all about helping them in indexing, processing, calculating relevancy and retrieving.

Search engines crawl the web to see what’s there. This is performed by the so called crawlers, spiders or bots, a piece of software. Spiders visit a site, index it and follow every single link they find on their way indexing each and every one of them. It is impossible for a spider to visit every site on daily basis of course as the number of pages on the web exceeds 20 billion. That is why SEO efforts take time to show results as sometimes websites won’t be visited by a search engine spider for months.

Once a web page is crawled its content is then indexed. This is by storing the content in a database and identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. This is where SEO becomes important as it helps search engines understand the meaning of the page content and hence indexing it appropriately resulting in higher rankings.

The search engine then processes search requests on their arrival and starts calculating the relevancy of each page stored in its database to the search string provided. Using various algorithms each will have different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links or metatags. Consequently different results are achieved at different search engines for the same search string. As a matter of fact, search engines like Yahoo!, Google and MSN change their algorithms periodically. Hence to keep a top ranking you need to adapt your web page to the latest changes. This is where devoted SEO efforts are necessary.

The final step is for the search engine to display the results. In a nutshell endless pages of search results displayed in the surfers web browser.