Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which owners of websites make improvements to the content, HTML code and inbound links of their web pages to make it easier for search engines to index them, and to ensure their pages naturally appear in results for relevant searches.

When you view a search engine result page in Google, Yahoo! Search or Microsoft Live Search, you almost always see two kinds of results: Sponsored Links, which advertisers pay to place on the page, and natural search results.  On Google, for instance, sponsored links can be found on the top and right-hand sections of the page, while natural (or organic) search results can be found in the main section of the page.  At the bottom of the page, you’ll typically see that the page is one of many, many pages of results.

The goal of SEO is to improve the volume and quality of traffic coming to your website from natural search results—traffic that is acquired for free. Obviously, sites that appear very high up on the first page of natural search results tend to see the greatest numbers of clicks and, therefore, traffic.  Which is why businesses, organizations, publications, and information and entertainment sites are increasingly concerned with how they can move links to their sites as high up on page one of natural search results as possible.

Search engines evaluate whether your page is relevant based on a variety of secret and not-so secret criteria.  Most of these criteria are designed to ensure that your page has content relative to the searches query.  This has two effects: first, searchers will be more satisfied with the results provided by the search engine and will become loyal users; and second, advertisers will be willing to pay more for advertising as the search engine will have more loyal and satisfied users.

Determining the keywords that naturally pertain to your business and service – the words that people will naturally enter into search boxes for information about any given topic – is an important first step in optimizing your site for search engines.  Once you’re clear what these keywords are, it’s important to be sure those keywords are represented in the content of your website.

It’s important to note here that each of your pages should be about a specific, unique topic, and not something broad and not something that is trying to match for multiple concepts.  SEO is competitive so you can’t be all things to all people.  It’s also important that you include your keywords in your site’s content in a way that’s both natural and intuitive – simply stuffing a bunch of keywords in your site’s content, for instance, will be a flag to the major search engines that something’s not quite right.

Next, you should make sure your pages are listed with the search engines (you can submit links to each search engine).

Another important step in SEO is ensuring that the title of each of the pages in your website are constructed in such a way that search engines can instantly relate them to relevant keywords searches.  If you’re not the webmaster for your website – that is, if you didn’t build it yourself – it may be difficult to understand how to change these page titles, as they are in the HTML code for your pages and invisible to you when viewing it.

One of the ways in which the major search engines determine the page ranking for your web pages also depends on the number and the quality of third-party links to your pages.  Again, these links must be natural – that is, they shouldn’t be a part of a dishonest linking scheme, as the major search engines have gotten very good at detecting these.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have tons of other ways to determine how it is your site will rank on a search result page for any given keyword query.  So it is the best policy to fill your website with content that is an honest reflection of your goods and services, as well as a reflection of the customers you do serve and whom you seek to serve.

Over time many people have concocted shady ways of getting at SEO for websites.  According to Wikipedia:

[A] class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

It is through authentic, high-integrity website creation – designed with your customers in mind first and foremost – that you are most likely to succeed in optimizing your site for the major search engines.

Small Plug: take a 30-day free trial of our Yield Web Marketing Suite, which includes fully automated processes for optimizing your website for search engines.  You get very practical, highly actionable to-do lists for improving and optimizing your website that are simple to understand and easy to act on.  SEO doesn’t have to be hard or intimidating, and we’d love to show you how.

For more information on the Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see Google’s guidelines for building and optimizing websites, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.