What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as “SEO,” is an enhanced service whereby you optimize the webpages of a website as per the rules of the search engines and help the search engine identify a webpage that is important to a particular set of keywords. This technique allows you to organically increase your search engine rankings. There are hundreds of techniques you could implement to organically increase your rankings in the search engines. However, the foundation to good SEO practice is to create good meta tags for each page of your website.

Explaining what search engines are, in this day and age, would probably be a waste of time since most of us not only use them on a daily basis, but a new word has even been coined to define this activity; "just Google it"!

A perhaps more useful (and relevant) thing to ask would be, how do I get my website ranked as high as possible so that people can find it quick and easy? Unless you're a national brand, whom people would be searching for by name, chances are you want your website to generate top listings based on keywords. In other words, if your company manufactures, sells, or has anything to do with "wonder widgets", you'd want people searching the Internet on this topic to hopefully find your site listed near the top of the search results.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO, as it is called for short, is the process by which a website is analyzed, optimized and ultimately picked up by search engines for indexing.

Not convinced yet? Let's try this definition, quoted from About.com:

"Search engine optimization, in a nutshell, is the process of overseeing the development or re-development of a website, so that it will naturally attract traffic by securing top ranking on the major search engines/directories for selected search terms and phrases"

Still not sure? Ok, let's try again. Search engines have their very own criteria by which they deem any given website's relevancy to a search that's being performed. Such criteria vary from search engine to search engine, and change over time. Thus, a true SEO project is ongoing; it cannot be said that an effective SEO technique is performed once, successful as it may be, and then stop.

It is not enough to obtain a high ranking as it is equally important to maintain it!

How exactly does SEO work?

To not hide behind words, SEO is a quest to beat the search engines at their own game. And, as the old adage goes, it is important to know one's enemy; enemy, in an affectionate way, of course. We need the search engines to sort out the never-ending billions of websites on the Internet.