What is SEO? Your Guide to SEO

By Lee Pearce on June 26, 2011 in SEO Basics

What is SEO?

So what is SEO I hear you ask? SEO is one of the trendiest terms in the world of Internet marketing. Short for Search Engine Optimisation, it is a process that basically targets improving a website’s visibility on the Internet, making it appear higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Here is your guide to SEO.

How does SEO work?

When someone is interested in a certain subject, nowadays the quickest way to find out anything about it is to run a quick Internet search. For example, if you would like to buy some furniture, in most cases before going to the store, you check out the prices online in order to get an idea of what you can get and so you run an online search.

Suppose company X has an online furniture store which they would like to show up in your searches when you’re interested in buying furniture. In order for you to get to it (unless you have found it somewhere else), it would have to at least appear in the top five, or at the very least the first page of your search results. For that simple reason, it is very likely that after the first two pages you will either lose patience or will consider that the websites you have already seen are sufficient to give you an idea on what is going on.

In order to make sure that company X end up in your search results, Internet marketers studied the way search engines work. These basically use some very complex algorithms to calculate different ranking factors. One of these is Page Rank. The Page Rank is meant to calculate the likelihood of someone randomly surfing the web (without using the search engines) to reach a certain website. For the Page Rank to be higher, a website would have to be linked to on many other websites who in turn, are also very likely to be reached through links.

A good way to improve company X’s visibility is to place their website’s link on websites that have high traffic and are properly linked themselves. That will help company X in two ways:
1) The online furniture website will start to be visited by visitors of the websites where the store’s link was placed.
2) The website’s Page Rank will improve, which in turn will improve its chance of being among the first search results in your search for online furniture information.

Now, of course Search Engine Optimisation is not as simple as straightforwardly going to a website and placing your link on it. First of all, because most websites will not really offer you that option and second of all because if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. Which ultimately means that everyone’s Page Rank would improve in the exact same manner thus leaving the online furniture website in pretty much the exact same spot as it was before.

Search engines also take into consideration the relevance of which your link resides when ranking your website online. Search engines are trying to calculate not just the number of websites the online furniture link is on, but also the likelihood of someone actually clicking on it. For example, if you are looking for an online furniture website and you end up on a website that has a link saying “click here for a cheap haircut”, the Page Rank will assume that you will not click on it simply because it is not on the topic that you are interested in. That is why, when taking into consideration Page Rank for a specific keyword (let’s say “online furniture”) your link would carry more weight (or link juice) if its anchor text or relevance is at least related to that keyword or topic of the website which your link resides.

In time, these “calculations” in the algorithm have led to more and more programmers developing software that is meant to trick the search engine rankings into basically increasing a website’s links through link spamming. Link spamming is the process of aggressively placing a link on a large number of highly ranked websites in order to outrank other websites. From the search engine’s point of view, this can lead to Page Rank increase for many websites that are actually irrelevant to the Internet user. That is why regular check-ups are done and websites that are found to use these methods are banned. More and more complex algorithms are added to this process, to weed out sites and users that take this approach. One term that is commonly used for these sorts of tactics is “black hat methods”.

Search Engine Optimisation is therefore a method that keeps developing as search engines are evolving and changing their ways of calculating the ranking factors of a website. Of course, many other factors come into play such as on page optimisation, domain age, inbound link quality, authority of your website, authority of websites linking to your websites to name a few.

How SEO can help your business.