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What is SEO?

Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under SEO |

Imagine, if you will, that you are searching for information about, say, dog food on the internet.  You will go to one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Live Search, or Ask.com.  You will type in the keywords “dog food” in the search box.  Almost immediately, you will be taken to a page of search results, which will give you a whole list of sites or articles concerning dog food.  This list of search results will usually run into tens or even hundreds of pages, listing probably thousands of sites which have something to do with dog food.  Each page will probably list about 10 sites. 


Now, you will most likely click on one or maybe even a few of the sites listed near the top of the first page of your search results, or if you are pretty desperate for information, even the second page.  But that’s all you will probably do. The rest of the tens or hundreds of pages of search results will be ignored. 

Imagine that a thousand people a day click to search for information on dog food on these very same search engines.  Chances are very high they will be presented the same pages with the same search results and they will also click on the same few listings at the top of the first page the way you did.

Now, if you had something to say or sell regarding dog food, it would naturally be in your best interests for your site to be located at the top of the search results, wouldn’t it?  There you would have so many more people accessing your site, and it would all be free for you, as you would not have to pay a single cent to be listed at the very top of these search results.  These are called organic search results (as opposed to paid search results, which are advertisements that you would have had to pay for to be seen on these very pages by people searching for dog food), and the reason your site is placed there is because the search engine robots have accessed your site, and have determined, based on their own peculiar sets of rules or algorithms, that your site has the quality good enough to be placed at or near the top of the first page of search results.

As it makes very good business sense to be listed at the top of search engine results for keywords that people are searching for, an entire industry has grown around this process of optimizing the quality of your site for this purpose.  Thus Search Engine Optimization (popularly known as SEO) is defined as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for certain specified or targeted keywords.

(Shoemoney has in a recent post detailed a list of replies to an email he sent to industry experts asking them: “What is the definition of SEO? “.  Their responses can be seen here. I asked a friend of mine the same question.  His response: SEO = push-up bra)

The unfortunate problem is that the sets of rules or search algorithms utilised by search engines are not publicised or well known. It has been suggested that some of the rules are kept deliberately secret with only a few general principles known, in order to avoid abuse of the system by some SEO experts who can, with a few cunning tweaks here and there in the website, convince the search engines that their sites are worthy of top placement in search results when they actually are not.

Certain general principles are well known to be considered essential factors in determining quality, such as a site’s
coding,
presentation,
structure,
content,
and links to other sites. 

SEO experts also concentrate on fixing site problems that could prevent the search engine robot from fully crawling the website. 

Certain other factors have also been mentioned by experts as being possibly important, such as
the year of registration of the site,
the length of the url,
the presence of keywords in the domain name,
whether the site is a .org, or .com, or .info, or .edu,
metatags,
keyword density in the content,
the presence of keyword in subdomains,
the presence of filename extensions (.htm, .html)
the presence of folder name in the url,
and whether the details of registration are kept private.

 

 

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