What is Search Engine Optimization?

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Peter Faber

What is Search Engine Optimization?
July 7, 2003

Search engines crawl the internet for web sites and index most of them. Based on what they find in a web site they determine the relevancy of the web site to words or terms that people search for. Knowing this you can imagine that it is possible to write your web site in such a way that the search engines find them to be more relevant to certain search terms. This is called search engine optimization or SEO.

Google.com, the worlds largest search engine, has over 3 billion web pages in its database and handles over 200 million searches per day. It is obvious how important search engines are for the business market.

However, it may be surprising how few companies actually appreciate the importance of the search engines. Many believe they don’t need it, and a part of them probably is right. But even if a business needs its web site just for giving contact information, it may be surprising how much more business they can get out of the search engines.

Visitors that reach a web site via a search engine are visitors that are searching for what that web site has to offer. There for they are the best visitors a web site can get. More high quality visitors generally results in more sales. It is obvious why SEO is a smart thing to do.

SEO has many important factors, which all should be considered. But it basically comes down to a few simple things. First of all, content is important. What is written in the web site? The search engines look for words that seem to be important in the web site. Then there is the question: “How many other web sites link to it?” This concerns the link popularity of a web site. Search engines assume that a web site that is linked to by many other web sites must be important. Due to abuse of this knowledge (people started to set up non relevant links), search engines also look at the relevancy of the link. A link from a web site that is totally unrelated will not have much influence. A link from a web site that is related, and also very popular, will have a big influence.

There are many more factors, to many to mention them all in this short article. And besides that, search engines change their algorithms a bit every now and then, to improve their service to the searchers.

One thing that is always painful is trying to trick the search engines. Sometimes it works, but in the end you will be penalized for doing it and may loose complete visibility in the search engines. Honest work always lasts longer.

There are many web sites that cover a lot more information about SEO. www.search engineguide.com is a good site. www.highranking s.com of Jill Whalen is also a good site. Jill has taught her self everything she knows about SEO and is considered one of the guru’s of SEO. You can use her SEO services to have your web site optimized for the search engines.

But if you have a small budget, check out this site: seo.web1000.com, free search engine optimization services. Maybe not as good as the pro’s, but definitely worth to pay a visit.

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Peter Faber is Dutch and has recently moved to Brazil. Visit Peter's Advise the World. Email Peter: getting_there@uol.com.br

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