Search Engine Optimization Basics

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the active and ongoing practice of improving elements of a website in order to receive increased web traffic from search engines. It makes no difference if your site provides products, services, information, or some other type of content - the need for SEO is the same, as are the methods.

Before examining the various ways to search engine optimize a site, let's first examine why search engine traffic and SEO are so important. Many website owners mistakenly believe that their primary traffic-generating tool, and therefore their main marketing focus, should be on advertising. But this is a myth. Year after year, studies have shown and confirmed that the majority of traffic a website receives is provided by search engines, especially by major commercial ones:

If the search engines are unable to find your site or are unable to put your content into their various databases, then your site will not appear in the relevant search results of your target audience's search queries and you will miss out on all of that free traffic. (Free traffic, incidentally, is also frequently called organic traffic, as distinct from paid and sponsored search engine results which are not the realm of SEO but of SEM – search engine marketing).

Now keep in mind, lest you overlooked that word "targeted" up there, search engine traffic is targeted traffic, meaning that the people viewing your site, link, and description are viewing it because they are looking for precisely what you have to offer. If there's one thing better than free traffic, it's targeted traffic, and search engine traffic is both.

One of the primary methods internet users employ to navigate the web and find what they're looking for is search engines. There is a virtually limitless, ever-regenerating abundance of targeted and interested visitors you can attract to your site by doing nothing other than search engine optimizing it.

Essentially, search engines use automated programs called spiders and bots which are running all the time, using the internet's hyperlink structure to thoroughly examine (or crawl) the various pages and documents comprising the web. These spiders and bots are always going, returning time and again to the same sites when led there by hyperlinks. Once the spiders and bots crawl a page, that page and all its content can then be indexed (or stored) in the respective search engine's database of web content.

With this ever-increasing compilation of information, the search engines respond to queries by retrieving all the documents from its index that match the given query, then ranking those matches according to a mathematical computation that amounts, at its core, to a combination of relevance and popularity.

In determining relevance, the search engines look at the documents comprising the pages making up a site, or put another way - the pages themselves. In determining popularity, they look at inbound links (or other sites linking to yours, and in what context).

One of the primary ways sites improve relevance is through the proper and effective use of keywords. Keyword research is integral to finding the highest value search terms to focus on to make sure your site is viewed as relevant to its subject matter. You can conduct keyword research by:

One of the primary ways sites improve popularity is through the careful and discriminating placement of potent inbound links. Just some of the key characteristics that search engines look for in link analysis are:

Search engine optimization isn't only about keywords and inbound links. It's about the usability of your site, its design and appearance ("look and feel"), its navigability, functionality, and accessibility, as well as the sheer quality of its content. SEO is a vast and intricate subject, and as a website owner, the more you know about it, the better off you are. Fortunately, any and every step you take to search engine optimize your site helps. It all adds up. To what, is up to you.