Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A search engine is a software that searches, index and returns matches that are usually presented in a list called SERP or "Search Engine Result Page." There are hundreds of search engines but the most popular are: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engines.

Optimization is modifying a web page/website to achieve the highest possible ranking when searched on the targeted keyword/s of the web page or website.

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization.

The primary purpose of SEO is to get your website to rank high in search engines, it is critical to remember that the reason for doing this is that you are trying to attract more visitors to your website, therefore it must be appealing to human visitors and not just search engines. This means that design, layout and quality content are very important factors, so remember to always think about the user experience your website delivers.

SEO doesn't require a vast expertise in programming or high-end technical design, but knowing the basics of HTML will make a significant difference. Since the majority of techniques involved in top search engine optimization involve text, it can also be referred to as SEO copywriting. Overall, the entire process deals with the effort to optimize web pages, in order to improve their position in search engine ranking.

For example, if you were to type in the words, 'What is SEO?' into a search engine like Google, then you will see a list of pages upon pages of websites, articles, and so on that deal in some way with the words you've entered. The more relevant the web pages, or the better the SEO consulting, the higher they will rank. The ultimate goal is to attain a first-page ranking. After all, few people look beyond this first page for results. The words you entered, 'What is SEO?' are called keywords, a major component in professional Search Engine Optimization.

Keywords, or keyword phrases, are a critical component of search engine optimization services. Since search engines are generally concerned with ranking web pages by text, then knowing how to create the text on your site, or in your articles, can have a vast and vital impact on how high your page, or site, ranks. There are techniques that are employed in writing SEO text and keyword density, but before discussing that, it's important to understand how search engines operate.

Search engines are machines. They aren't a crowd of people huddled around a room somewhere sifting through website after website logging relevance, links, and other information and ranking them based on some algorithm. They are machines doing a similar process without the human element. These search engines don't care about the color or design or layout of a website. They can't measure aesthetic qualities. They care about content.

Search engines are not intelligent and therefore how they move through the Internet and web pages is a fixed manner. They crawl through the web searching through every single page that exists. Currently there are over twenty billion (yes, billion) web pages on the Internet. These machines, called crawlers or spiders or in Google's case, Googlebots, follow links from one page to the next indexing, processing, and calculating a complicated series of algorithms to decide where a particular page should rank based on any number of factors involving keywords.

Since these search engines are fixed entities that follow a particular pattern, understanding how to build content on a site to achieve the best results, or highest rank, is possible with the right knowledge.

Here are some basic but important pointers to remember in SEO:

1. Put your most relevant keywords and search terms in the title, description, and first few lines of your website text and content.

2. Make your website easy to navigate. Have a plan for your page hierarchy and make sure your links are clearly defined.

3. Create a site-map so to insure quick and accurate indexing of your websites pages.

4. Come up with essential and precise keywords. Use them as link anchor text. If you have a blog, use them as the "category" titles and in your individual post titles.

5. Make sure plain text image tags use your relevant keywords as well. Search engines only index plain text tags and not keywords or text embedded in image files.

6. Make sure you have no broken links.

7. Make sure your HTML tags are accurate.

8. The "robots.txt" file should be updated and accurate and not block any of the search engine crawlers like the Google Bot.

9. Last but not the least, build inbound links to your website by submitting to directories, submitting articles, posting at forums and promoting your website at social media sites.