Define Search Engine Optimization – What Does Search Engine Optimization Mean?

Search engine optimization is an enormous subject, which involves the various actions you need to take to get your website to rank well in search engine results. These actions will include visible changes you make to your website, and things you need to do that cannot be seen on your web pages. The reason search engine optimization is so important is that if you do not get it right, your website is likely to have no visitors at all unless you pay for advertising.

The only way to get regular free traffic to your website is to have pages which are returned on the first pages of search engine results. Websites featuring in the top three places receive many times more visitors than any outside the top three, and if your site is not in the top thirty results, you may as well not be in the top thousand. This is why search engine optimization matters so much.

To be in the top results, your web pages need to be optimized for words and phrases that people are searching for, and you need to ensure that the search engines see your site as an authority in these areas. When someone types a phrase into a search engine such as Google, what the search engine then tries to do is find all the sites that have information relevant to the term searched for, and then present the results in a ranked order, with the most important or authoritative sites at the top. That is a very crude approximation of what is actually an extremely complex process, but it is generally accepted that this is more or less the main thrust of what Google does.

Judging the relevance of your site is fairly straightforward matter of analysing the information on your website. But how does Google decide which sites are most important? A very good, and crucial question. What the guys at Google want to see is a web full of interesting sites, packed with useful information. They make the reasonable assumption that if a site is a good one, webmasters from other sites will link to it to help their own visitors. Therefore one of Google’s main measures for the importance of a site is the quantity and quality of links from other sites that are pointing to it.

Quantity is self explanatory, but quality is an important point to understand. A hundred links from unrelated sites that Google does not consider important are likely to be of less worth than one link from a site that Google ranks very highly and which covers a subject closely related to your site.

There are many other aspects and details involved in search engine optimization, but most of the detail is conce
ed with the main points I have outlined - having the right search terms on your page and getting enough of the right sort of links pointing to your site.