What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization

An email from Anna Milkovich almost made my heart skip a beat. It was a one line email and it asked – What is search engine optimization really?

It was the most simple question one could ask me on SEO, but ironically nobody have asked me this question yet on email.I must appreciate Anna to have taken the pain in writing to me asking this question.

In fact, what hit me was – i assumed that everyone knew what SEO is, and nobody would be asking such a simple question to me. But hey – somebody have asked me and here I am trifled!

So, this piece of information is for Anna.It’s basic Search engine optimization stuff, so regular readers may find this boring.

Search Engine Optimization is a practice or a set of procedures done by website owners to get more traffic to their site from search engines.

In layman’s language, all that stuff done to get more people to visit your website and thereby get money from it.

There are different ways and procedures to get this done. There are the bad methods and the good methods. The good methods are the ones that are advised by Google and the other prominent search engines, while they do not want you to do the bad methods(known as Black Hat Search Engine Optimization).

In SEO, many of the procedures are advised by Google as they bring traffic to any website on the internet than any other search engine.Many webmasters like to follow the SEO measures advocated by them.So don’t be amazed to see people talking about only Google when talking about SEO.

According to the Wikipedia,

Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

The idea of SEO is based on the fact that – Many people use the search engines to find information on the internet. And when they use a search engine, they rely on the top most results that appear on the search engine page. Therefore what every Search Engine Optimization guru, tries to do is get their website in the top results for a particular search item.And for a single website, when they have optimized their pages so as to appear on the top results for all the search terms they are interested in – he is likely to be successful.

For example,if you see this blog. We are on the top results for the search term(called keyword) – “Iphone themes“. So whenever someone searches for iphone themes on google using the keyword – iphone themes- this blog would come up in the top 5 and the user is likely to visit it.

That’s the whole idea. Now, getting your blog to come up in the top results isn’t simple.It involves lot of thinking and idea implementation.If you will go through this blog’s archives you will see many useful pieces of tips regarding how you can successsfully use search engine optimization techniques to make your blog come up on the top pages of search engines.

Some of them are -

Keyword research
Keyword density
Title tag usage
Linking
Meta tags and a whole lot.

I normally refer a few blogs to my readers such as – Michael Gray’s SEO blog, SEO round table, SEOmoz and the like. They are indeed great resources on search engine optimization. you may also want to read Matt Cutt’s (who’s a Google employee) blog where he posts his thoughts on search engine optimization.

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