Posted by admin on Tue, 01/22/2008 — 01:12

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined by WikiPedia 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 targeted keywords. It sounds a little overwhelming when you first read that definition, so hopefully we can help you understand what SEO is, and how it can be used to help an online business.

The SEO
My name is Josh Garner, and I’m a freelance SEO (Search Engine Optimizer). «Hi Josh.» Hopefully I can explain a bit better than the definition above what SEO is, and is all about.

As an SEO, my job is to «optimize» a website so as to attain higher rankings in the search engine, and provide my clients with a return on their investment; be it making a sale online, or getting a phone call, or a walk through the door, etc. By «optimize,» I mean that I will fine tune the site’s structure, content, meta information, and a large number of other factors (as much as I can find will appear on this blog) so the search engines will take a liking to it.

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 its 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. I’m sure there are a few questions about how SEO can help a business, or some more details on the ranking factors, but first may want to read ‘SEO Myths’ to see a little bit about what SEO is not.