What is Search Engine Optimization?
By Todd Mumford

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all the rage and appears to be the catch phrase of the year. Companies are scrambling to hire competent search engine ranking professionals who can catapult their website into the upper ranks of the major search engines. But, what is search engine optimization, and where did this seemingly niche profession originate? In this article, we will look at the basics of SEO; what it is, how it works, and possibly, some of its origins.

Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization is a set of techniques applied to various properties of a domain – webpages, websites as a whole – to allow a particular page to be found easier (rank higher) in search engines. The three major search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN, although there are many more useful search engines also available. Simply because these three appear to be the most popular, the majority of SEO’s (those that apply SEO techniques) concentrate their efforts on optimizing pages for these particular search engines.

Given that the largest portion of online users find what they are looking for using search engines, it follows, that in order to market a product or service, your website – particular pages – must be visible in those search engines. Further to this, since most users rarely navigate past the first or second results pages of a given ‘search phrase,’ it is important that a webpage rank in the top ten or twenty returned results for any given search. This is where ‘SEO’ meets the search engines.

The major search engines understand that businesses and companies are all vying for the precious top ranking position in the returned results, and therefore, in an attempt to make fair practices, change their ranking algorithm to allow more quality websites the chance to rank highest. This is also done to attempt search engine optimization experts from being able to find the ‘magic formula’ to website ranking.

Two important main factors of search engine placement are ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ factors, which will we thoroughly discuss in an upcoming article.

On-page optimization refers to techniques applied to a particular page to help that page rank such as, but not limited to:

Off page optimization refers to techniques applied to a site as a whole, or to a page or series of pages set apart from the website proper. Although this can involve PPC (pay per click management), marketing and advertising as well as many other initiatives, the most important example of ‘off page’ optimization is ‘inbound linking,’ commonly referred to as ‘link popularity.’ Because the major search engines ‘judge’ a given page rank partially by the amount of hyperlinks pointed at it, it stands to reason the more ‘high quality’ and ‘relevant’ links pointed at your website, as well as what those links ‘say’ about your website (the link text) can have a huge influence on your rank in those major engines. We will look at link popularity in detail in an upcoming article.

Keep up to date on Search Engine Optimization with our next article, “Search Engine Optimization – On Page Elements”

Articles by Todd Mumford

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