Search Engine Optimization [Part One] - Introduction

Search engine optimization, SEO, is about creating a website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings. A website that’s optimized for search engines can reap huge benefits on to the website and ultimately the core business.

In the past, it was enough to tweak some meta-tags and certain on-the-page factors to attain top search engine ranks. Today, search engine optimization is not that simple. It is not enough to simply modify meta-tags and submit your site to the search engines. When optimizing a web site, there are thousands of factors to keep in mind.

There are three main factors that determine the search engine ranking of a website:

1. Site optimization
2. Site popularity
3. Link popularity

Site optimization is about placing the right keywords in the right places on a website and making the website accessible to search engines.

Site popularity can be achieved through online and offline marketing and through link popularity - the more websites that link to a website the more popular it will become.

SEO is about making a website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings.

• 42% to 86% of websites are found through search engines.
• There are 300 million searches carried out per day, every day

How Search Engines Work
The term “search engine” is commonly used to specify both the search engine crawlers as well as the human powered search directories.

The crawler based search engines, such as Google or Altavista, use software programs (called robots, crawlers or spiders) to create their index. These software programs crawl the world wide web to accumulate information about new or modified sites. When people search, they actually search in the search engine indexes.

The human edited search directories, such as Yahoo, ODP or Looksmart, depend on humans for including web sites into it. They maintain a hierarchical structure of directories and sub-directories called categories or sub-categories. Web sites are submitted into their related categories.
Read the “How Search Engines Work” section of this series for a slightly more detailed explanation.

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