What is SEO? - SEO Explained
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. And it is big business.
What it refers to is a series of strategies, some proven, some not, which aim to make your website more visible to the search engines, help the search engine index it more accurately, and therefore give you a higher placement in the search listings (closer to page 1). The higher your rank, the more people are likely to click on your site.
The whole thing revolves around two factors:
Competition – The web is fiercely competitive. When you search any give term, you may come up with millions of hits, displayed on hundreds of thousands of pages. What good does it do if your page ends up on page 862, if people are not going to look past the first three pages of hits, or 10 if they are really digging deep?
Search Engine Technology – Search engines have their own rules. Some of those rules keep changing, but a few are pretty logically set and won't change. In order to optimize, you have to understand how the search engine sees and rates your page, and then help it to see your content more accurately.
Search engines see text. They do not see pretty pictures, and they mostly ignore colors (except in a few instances). No matter how gorgeous your site looks, it won't mean a thing to your ranking unless you have elements that the search engines can see and interpret correctly.
You'll hear the term “Keyword” tossed around a lot. A keyword is nothing more than a word that a person is likely to use to search for a particular topic. If you sell wide shoes, they may search “wide shoes”, “e width shoes”, “hard to find shoe sizes”, etc. Those are all keywords, which may in fact be phrases, not just words. Some people get really anal about keywords, as though the whole search engine world revolves around getting just the right ones. I have a more casual attitude, so if you are thinking it has to be hard, relax.
The other term you need to know is “pagerank”, because that is used in search engine optimization circles too. It merely means a number that the search engine gives you to determine how important your site is when weighed against others that seem to have information that is just as relevant as yours. When there are thousands of sites that seem to have relevant matching material for a search, the ones with higher pagerank get listed first.
Pagerank is determined by the search engine's evaluation of your site's popularity. It measures that popularity by how many sites out there have links to your site. The more sites you have linking back to you, the more popular they think your site is, so the higher they rank your page. Of course, in actual operations it is not that simple, but that is the theory anyway.
Search Engine Optimization involves two types of strategies:
Internal strategies which focus on improving the code and content of your pages so that the search engine can “see” them better and more accurately tell what the site is about.
External strategies which involve getting links back to your site to improve page ranking.
Each of these has some rules, and some strategies that you can use. Each of them has some strategies which you absolutely should NEVER use as well. And if you get nothing else from this site, PLEASE pay attention to the things you should not do, because they will not just waste your time, they can actually hurt your site's ability to get traffic.
We'll get down to details in the other pages of the site...
