Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of creating web pages that are more attractive to Internet search engines. Most Internet businesses consider search engine optimization to be a major contributor to any successful marketing plan or program.

How did the need for “optimizing” a website come about?

In the dark ages of the Internet, circa the mid 90’s, SEO was born. In its infancy, search engine optimization was basic. Many available “search engines” were no more than web scouring directories that could extract (a bit) more relevant data from a website, than was originally submitted by the web site’s owner. Nevertheless, a good search engine was able to perform a discriminatory evaluation and assign a weight or ranking, based on the relevance of the web site’s informational content, keywords, description, textual and graphic milieu. Although the early search engine spiders were able to extract and assess data, a large portion of a web site’s high search engine ranking still depended greatly on quality material, submitted by a web master.

Web masters soon realized that by utilizing various “black-hat” techniques they could easily improve their web site’s search engine ranking. One such popular technique was to greatly increase the use of keywords, often to huge multiples, and have them hidden in the background of a website.

A higher query ranking meant more visitors, and in turn, (usually) more money. A concept all web masters easily understand.

Enter the search engine algorithm.

“Algorithm” is possibly one of the least understood words commonly found on the Internet. In this application, it means the strict system of instructions the search engine spider follows in its endeavor to correctly rank websites. If a search engine operator wishes his or her algorithm to include instructions to assign the lowest rank to all websites with the word “blue” in them, anyone who sold “Blue-Ray Hi-Def” or “Blues” music would be devastated by their revised ranking.

As web masters got more creative about subverting the existing algorithms, the search engines tweaked their formulas to counter the tricks and ploys. One major change adopted by search engines was the weight it placed on the presentations and protestations of web masters. As such, they successfully developed software capable of deeply investigating the website itself and forming a quasi-logical, determination about what it found.

A search engine will consider

• the web site’s domain name

• all the words applied in the title

• how often keywords appear

• how close keywords are together

• the sequence in which keywords appear

• the “ALT” attributes attached to images

• the META tags

Most important of all, the search engine looks at the textual content of the website. Based upon these findings, it formulates a decision on how all of these factors come together, how they match the claims of the web master and how they meet the expectations of search engine clients.

Again it seems, “Content is king!”

For major search engines such as Google, website content alone is not enough to ensure that its customers are achieving the most valuable search results and that websites are receiving the most accurate search ranking. As such, Google has developed a system known as the “Page Rank”. This system carefully inspects the number of incoming links to the website. In other words, how many other websites on the Internet consider this website relevant to the interests of their clients and as such, of value to the interests of search engine clients?

Techniques such as: picking a relevant domain name, including important keywords and phrases in the title, having keywords show up in such places as the image ALT tag, and stressing keywords through the use of headline text and by placement at the beginning and end of the page, are all of equal importance. Having lots of inbound links from relevant sites is as important as internal linking (the development and value of the Site map is another important topic).