Friday, February 1, 2013

What is SEO and Why Should You Learn It

SEO.  The three letters stand for Search Engine Optimization.  Based on this acronym, it's easy to guess that it has something to do with search engines and optimizing or enhancing website performance. 

To understand the concept of search engine optimization, imagine the World Wide Web as one huge spider web.  The spider must crawl along the thread to make its way around the web. In the same way, the World Wide Web is made up of billions of websites which are all inter-connected by a threadlike network.  Search engine spiders can crawl along these threadlike network to discover web pages. 

What are search engines?
Search engines help us find the exact information we need from the World Wide Web. How? We simply need to type a word or a phrase related to the information we are looking for, and let the search engine spider crawl along the threads and bring back a list of web pages with content relevant to our search.  

But, you may ask, "with a multitude of pages to discover in such a vast network, how does a search engine know which pages to include in the search result?"  Good question.  Search engines do not just discover web pages and bring back results based on keywords alone.  It also distinguishes good, quality websites from the poor ones.  Needless to say, it prioritizes good websites and these will float on top of search result listings. 

Why SEO is Essential
Now, here is where Search Engine Optimization becomes a matter of importance.  There are different factors which can affect a website's search engine ranking.   Each search engine has a set of metrics or algorithms that it uses to gauge the relevance, popularity and quality of a website.  Optimizing search engine means taking the necessary steps to make sure that your website meets the search engines' criteria of a good, quality website.

Now, try to search for a specific keyword in Google, for example, and notice that you will get not just one or two-pages of results but more likely, a couple of pages, even a hundred of pages containing a list of websites that contains the keyword you searched for.  Which websites are included on the first page or the first few pages?  These are supposedly the websites that offer the most significant and relevant information on the keyword being searched.  In addition, the websites on the first page also bear the highest rankings which is why it is given the top priority on the list.

Of course, if you were searching for information, wouldn't you most likely check out the websites found on the first page of the results list?   You may also check out the results found on the second, third or the next few pages but only if you do not find what you need right away.  Consequently, websites that are on the bottom pages has a slim chance of getting discovered.  Thus, you can begin to understand why websites are competing achieve a high rank and be on top of the search engine's listing.

Indeed, SEO is such a crucial endeavor for many webmasters.  Should you learn it?  Understanding the concept of SEO and implementing basic SEO steps can tremendously enhance your website's search engine rank and make it more accessible to people. So long as you stick with "white hat" SEO techniques,  optimizing your website for search engines would bring many advantages.


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