SEO, standing for Search Engine Optimization, is an internet marketing practice through which a website is made visible and relevant to the search engines in order to drive more, high quality traffic and therefore, paying customers to that site.
From the top
When a web user enters a search query into search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and so on, a cascade of activity is triggered. The search engine’s spiders are sent out to crawl the entire worldwide web using links to hop within and in between sites. Their task is to bring back all the HTML or textual information that they deem relevant to the initial query. This information is stored in the search engine’s database or ‘index’ where it is ordered in terms of relevance and importance and presented back to the web user. Search engine optimization works to feed these spiders information that makes them rank, according to that search engine’s algorithm, your site as most relevant to the initial search query and present you at the top of the search results.
SEO keywords
In order to appear at the top of the search engine results, search engine optimisation concentrates on the interface between your site and the search engine spiders. This includes working strategically to identify the search terms, or ‘keywords’ that will yield the greatest return on investment for your products or services e.g. assessing search potential, competition and relevancy of those keywords. This enables the spiders to match your site more easily to the search query.
SEO strength
Keywords alone won’t give you a good ranking. SEO also aims to ensure that your site is considered more important than other sites on the same topic or theme. This importance comes from the strength lent to your site by links from other sites. When the spiders crawl the web they jump sites by using the links embedded in those sites. Quite simply, the more links that point to your site, the more visible and important you are to the search engine. A good linking system within your site is also important to ensure the spiders can access all the content and keywords it contains rather than quickly jumping through to another site.
SEO structure
Search engine optimization irons out all the kinks in your site structure to make sure it can be fully spidered. This includes improvements to coding, content, page structure and so on. Framed sites and sites that use excessive flash for example are far less visible to the search engines and may require complete rebuilds in order to be effectively optimized.
The beauty of SEO is that it is so highly measurable. All of the above can be tracked and analysed to provide webmasters with a clear picture of their website’s performance, what keywords are generating the most traffic and conversions for example. This facilitates further fine-tuning to increase the profitability of the site by manipulating SEO features or adapting products and services accordingly.
To find out more about the different stages of a search engine optimisation project, check out our article 4 Steps to Successful SEO.