SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It involves making your website rank well on organic search results (also called natural search results) by making it search engine-friendly. The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to be on the first page of organic search results, preferably at the top position. SEO encompasses all the things you can do to get high rankings for your web pages on search engine results.
If you are an absolute newbie, you are probably wondering why you should optimize your website for the search engines, and what these search engines are all about. So let’s start with search engines.
What are Search Engines?
Search engines of the type we are discussing here are web search engines, and these are used to look for information on the internet. We enter our search terms, i.e., what we are looking for, into the search engine and it will bring up a list ofresults with related information presented in web pages, images, or files.
In order to bring up such results, the search engines first must have the information in their databases. Information is gathered by programs that automatically browse web pages on the internet. These programs are called web crawlers, spiders, or bots; they retrieve web pages and analyze their content using algorithms. The data then get stored in the index database of the search engine. When we conduct a web search, the search engine looks into its index database for information that best match what we are looking for, and displays them on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Three Major Search Engines
There arethree major search engines, namely, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
Google has the biggest market share, approximately 91% towards the end of 2010, according to the StatCounter Global Stats. The Google search engine is owned by Google Inc., which was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. Google, Inc. became a public corporation in 2004.
Yahoo!, with approximately 4% market share towards the end of 2010, comes next. It is owned by Yahoo! Inc. which was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994 and incorporated in 1995. In mid-2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Bing will be powering Yahoo! Search. The transition to the Bing search engine has been completed in the USA and Canada.
Bing, formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search, is owned by Microsoft.Itwas launched in 2009 and had an approximate 3% market share towards the end of 2010, per StatCounter Global Stats.The transition of Yahoo! Search to the Bing search engineis expected to be completed worldwide by early 2012.
The Beginnings of Search Engine Optimization
SEO had its beginnings around the mid-1990s, when webmasters saw the value in having their web pages appear on search results, and started submitting URLs to search engines so that their pages could be crawled and indexed.The term Search Engine Optimization itself was first used in 1997, on the website of Multimedia Marketing Group.
The early search engines relied much on keyword density and keyword meta tags, and thus it was easy to manipulate rankings; one merely had to put the targeted keywords into the meta tags and insert those keywordsa lot of times into the content of webpages to optimize them for the search engines. This did not result in good user experience and so measures were sought to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings.
By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of manipulation. The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not reveal the algorithms they use to rank pages.Google now says it ranks web pages using more than 200 different factors.
Why do SEO?
As mentioned above, webmasters early on saw the value in having their web pages appear on search results; the higher on it they are found the better. So what exactly is this value that they saw?
Web pages that arevisible and highly ranked in search engine results get more traffic.Sites with pages getting more traffic get more chances to achieve their goals, i.e., make sales, drive traffic to other sites (for affiliate sites and sites that carry advertisement), and disseminate information (non-profit websites, educational websites), among others.
SEO Factors
There are two types of factors that impact search engine optimization. These are called On-Page SEO factors and Off-Page SEO factors.
On-page SEO is predominantly about keyword density, meta tags, headings, and links on a web page, as well as site structure. As mentioned above, SEO was mostly about putting targeted keywords on a page; all you had to do for good rankings was stuff all your keywords, even misspelled variants, as many times as you canunto your web page, both in the meta tags and into the copy itself.
Search algorithms have matured since then, and shallow, easily manipulated indicators of relevance such as keyword density now have much less value.What needs to be done nowadays for on-page optimization is to make sure that page content is of high quality – well-written and contains useful and correct information – and is highly-relevant to the targeted keyword. While targeted keywordsshould still be included in the main content, meta title, meta description, image alt tags and headline tags, it is best to not overdo it as keyword stuffing is already considered web spam.
Off-Page SEO factors, which involveexternal links to a site, are now more important than On-Page SEO. Links from other sites are vital towards ranking well on the SERPs.The quality and quantity of links pointing to a site and what text the links contain are what the search algorithms primarily look into when ranking web pages.And so it behooves us to get as many sites as possible, preferably high quality sites, to link to our own sites.