Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of modifying or "optimizing" a website so as to gain more visibility on the Internet through search engines like Google. This usually means gaining higher rankings in the search engines for the search terms that people use to find your product or service.

The Search Engines
If you haven't already (and I'm pretty sure you have) go to Google.com. Type in a search. Anything at all. You see all that stuff? Well, that's what happens when you search on Google. Google is a search engine, and it's job is to process your search query, and return to you a list of websites it believes to be most relevant. In this respect, most of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) act in much the same way. They take what you type in, and give you what they think you want. I say think because, like anything else man-made, it isn't a perfect system. As such, this is really where SEO comes in.

You see, the search engines have a vested interest to return results that you want. They make their money through advertising, so the more users they have, the more lucrative their ad spots will become. Likewise, if you were to use Google, and it consistently returned poor results, you would soon leave, and the ad spots would decrease in value; at the same time pushing the value of the search engine you decided to move to up just a little more. So, how do they determine what the right results are?

Relevancy
This term is used a lot in the SEO world. The idea for a search engine is to return relevant results, meaning results that would satisfy your search. Once a website is included in a search engines index (the database that holds a record of all sites that a search engine has crawled and listed) an algorithm makes a number of decision on it's relevancy to terms depending on the site's content. The more relevant a site is to a certain word or term, the higher its location in a search engine's results page (SERP). Now, there are a lot of things that determine a website's relevancy in a search engine's eyes, and all the engines determine it in different ways.

Overall, a site's content, its markup (HTML, the way your site is built), and it's popularity online make up a large portion of the relevance determination. Those, along with the selection of the words you want your site to target, the competition of those terms, where and how they are used on your page(s), what other websites link to yours, how many sites link to yours, how other sites link to yours, and a great giant number of other fine details help to push your relevancy score higher; and so your rankings will follow. Sound like a lot? It is. But it's not as much as it sounds like it is right now. You might have few questions about how SEO can help a business, so we compiled a few numbers that you might find interesting.