What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

By Adam Saunders     February 27, 2009     Tags:

What is search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO? I've found that people, even search professionals, are often confused about what exactly search optimization is. Everyone is pretty clear on the goal of search optimization, to make a website or webpage rank highly for a keyword or set of keywords in the organic search results of major search engines. How exactly this is accomplished is another story entirely and this is where much of the confusion comes from.

The basics of SEO are really quite simple to understand, so let's break SEO down into it's component parts and cut through the confusion, which sadly is often created by inexperienced or even evil SEO practitioners who make things complex and mysterious in order to charge clients lots of money for questionably effective services.

There are three overarching strategies which are used to improved search engine ranking. For this article, let's call these strategies link love, semantic code, and search friendly copy.

Link Love

Link love is pretty clearly the mother of all SEO techniques. Google conquered the search world by recognizing that calculating the quantity and quality of links to a webpage was the best way to determine the relevance of a webpage rank it in search results.

Today Google determines search ranking through an incredibly complex algorithm that calculates search ranking based on thousands of variables, so the story goes. No one really knows since the Google algorithm is a super crazy big secret. The one thing that we do know for sure is that the number and quality of the links to your website are still the most important variables in that equation.

The funny thing is that most SEO firms are terrible at generating link love, because choosing to link to a site on some level involve passion and lust. Someone has to see something on your website that is so important or relevant to them that they just have to link to it and tell all their friends about it. Most SEO firms are composed of technicians who are not particularly good at eliciting this kind of passion. Generating lust is something that artists and writers are really good at, but you'll be hardpressed to find an SEO firm with artists and writers on staff, unless you come to Market Anomaly that is;)

Be very wary when an SEO firm tells you that they are going to generate thousands of inbound links to your website. How exactly do they plan to do this? Most likely their "plan" will involve some kind of paid inclusion technique, which if discovered by Google will get you totally black listed from the search results, meaning your site will not appear at all in their results for a very long time. In SEO land, don't trust the practitioner who seems to be offering something too good to be true. He most certainly is. Building link love takes time, patience, and a lot of hard work. Unless your SEO firm is a true hybrid with experienced writers and technicians, this responsibility should most probably be handled by your PR department with guidance from a competent SEO firm.

Semantic Code

Okay, enough knocking SEO firms. Many SEO firms are great at creating properly coded websites that can be easily indexed i.e. read and ranked by search engines. They are experts at taking terribly coded web pages i.e. the majority of the internet, and improving these pages so that search engines love them.

There are many techniques that go into creating search engine friendly webpages. The following are some important techniques for optimizing a webpage:

  1. Add metatags to all pages and content on a website
  2. Add important keywords to the path of all pages on a website
  3. Change the structure of the XML code, so the most relevant content appears first when the search engine reads the webpage.
  4. Create and XML sitemap of the webpage and submit it to the major search engines.
  5. Fix .htaccess, robots.txt, and other files that may be misconfigured on your site.

There are many additional steps that may need to be taken to fix your website and it does pay to have a professional look at your site structure if you are serious about SEO. If you are working with an SEO firm, I would suggest focusing your project on this aspect of SEO, as this is what these companies truly excel at.

Search Friendly Copy

Many SEO firm will want to rewrite your website copy with a mind towards search optimization. Here is another area where the line between art and science gets blurry, so you will want to balance the input from your SEO firm with your own gut instinct. Remember, humans read your website too!

For this reason, you definitely don't want an SEO firm writing your website copy unless they actually have top notch writers on staff. The best relationship for the creation of search friendly web copy is one where the SEO firm is training those who write your marketing materials on how to write in a slightly more search engine friendly way. Good writers will know when to push back ignore certain SEO rules when they conflict with the meaning and relevance of the text to human readers.

Conclusion

It's important to create semantically perfect web pages that search engines can read, but this goal needs to be achieved while still creating incredibly engaging and interesting content that excites, entertains, and/or educates your audience. Only then will you achieve true SEO Zen and incredibly high search ranking.