SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is how you communicate your websites relevancy to the search engines for the terms (keywords and keyword phrase) your target market is searching for.

It has also been defined as a method of improving the number and quality of visitors to your website from “natural” “organic” or “algorithmic” search results. 

In “girlfriends terms” its what you do to get people to find your site when they type a search phrase into a search bar.  I know you thought you could get a kick butt web site designed them bam there are the people “If you build it – they will come…” That’s NOT how it works.  It would be so much simpler if it did.

Lets go back in time just a little here so you can see what happened.  Back in the mid-1990’s all a webmaster needed to do was submit your site to the major search engines.  The search engines “spiders” would “crawl” your site, and store the data in a database. The early search engines relied on the webmasters to describe their sites by using Meta Tags and the search engines categorized the sites based on these tags. 

Well it didn't’t take long for webmasters to learn how to “cheat”.  So the search engines had to get smarter and began using complex algorithms to categorize web sites.  They started including more information such as text with in the title tag, domain name, URL directories and file names, tags, term frequency, keyword density, keyword proximity, keyword adjacency, keyword sequence, site maps, and ect…. Well the more sophisticated the algorithms become the more sophisticated the webmasters became at “cheating!”

This brings us to now… search engine optimization that has become a science – or a dance if you will with intricate steps to do and even more to avoid.  The dance is not difficult to do – you just need to know the steps.  Yes there are still many “cheaters” out there.  They refer to their practices as “black hat SEO”.  I will cover black hat SEO in a different article – more as a what to look out for and avoid.  But our focus here will be what is referred to as “white hat SEO”, SEO practices that follow the rules… or in this case tries to give you practical steps you can take that are in the rules.

But back to the history of SEO, at this point the SEO of the web site is still within the power and control of the webmaster.  All of the algorithm parts were entered into the code and content of the website.  Well in order to end the abuse and ranking manipulation of webmasters the search engines adapted the SERP's. 

Most people blame the search engines on being difficult but really all they are trying to do is return the most relevant results to their users - the searchers. I remember being very frustrated searching for information on the net - typically my searches returned not the sites I wanted but website's that had my term listed over and over without any relevant information. This is what the search engines are trying to accomplish - the return of good quality sites. We just have to convince them that are sites are good quality for the terms we want.

Why does Google get to set the rules? Google does not regulate the internet - although they probably are the closest to a governing body that the internet has. This is simply because they own the biggest market share or have the most people using their search engine. This is a clear case of "they who have the most - win." Most of SEO practices are set with Google in mind. There are other search engines; Yahoo and MSN are the next biggest players. Each of the search engines uses slightly different criteria on how they rank and evaluate website's.

I will address each search engine after I get the tutorials up and running. If you have any questions on what are search engines - please feel free to contact me at diva@myseodiva.com - and I will add the answers and information as appropriate.