Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of
optimizing a website through an extensive mixture of tasks
that help improve a website's presence on the search
engines. So this brings up the question, "What is a Search
Engine?" This question can easily be answered by asking you
to get on the internet and visiting Google.com, Yahoo.com,
or MSN.com. These are the most popular and Major Search
Engines. A search engine is an extensive database that uses
algorithms (the way information is collected) to pull
information quickly and efficiently, making information
easily available. A person using a search engine will
specify criteria (keywords/phrases) about something they
are interested in for example "Real Estate". When a person
enters their search criteria into the search engine they
hope to find information that is most relevant to the
keywords entered. This is the main goal of a search engine,
to give its users totally relevant results of their search
criteria.
Now it is important to know how search engines work to
understand the question "What is SEO?" Search Engines use
robots or spiders, which are software that gather
information and bring it back to be analyzed at the main
Search Engine Index or in simple terms the main central
database that stores all the information. This process in
which the search engine spiders gather this information is
called "Crawling", or "Spidering". Here is the best way we
could think of explaining this process. Imagine a spider
family that needs to gather Food (in the case of the WWW
think of food as the HTML text on your website) to bring
back to the main spider-web (Search Engine Index
"Database"). The spider uses a highway (HTML Links on
Websites) to gather food faster and more efficiently. Once
the spider has gathered food, it then takes it back to the
spider-web (Search Engine Index "Database"). Now the
information is sorted out, and the Search Engine uses this
information to help the user find what he or she is looking
for. So when someone searches "Real Estate" the Search
Engine will provide results that are most relevant from its
database. Note: Search Engines are constantly changing the
way their spiders collect information and how it is stored
in their Index, this is why it is so important to stay
up-to-date on changes and techniques.
Keep in mind that on the search engines there are sponsored
links that are Paid Search results that usually are placed
on the top, side, and bottom of the natural search results.
This is a whole other subject called Paid Per Click (PPC)
so keep in mind that SEO deals with natural rankings and
PPC deals with paid rankings.
Now that you know what Search Engines are and how they
work, you can now better understand what SEO (Search Engine
Optimization) is and how it can help you. Here is another
good example using the spider analogy. Think of a person
performing SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) to a website as
the spider feeder. This professional will optimize the way
that the spider collects food. In terms of a website the
professional will optimize the website so that the Search
Engine spiders will easily be able to gather the required
and relevant information.
Read What Is SEO? Part 2 to continue learning some basic
SEO techniques that professionals do to optimize a website
for the Search Engines.
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Find out more about SEO at
http://www.LearnSEOLive.com
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