What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of actively enhancing and promoting a website in order to be discovered by search engines, stored in their indexes, and ranked within their results for a determined keyword or set of keywords.

There are many different ways to define what SEO is. In my definition above I attempted to cover the mainstream perspective of SEO practice. For an idea of how varied and widespread SEO definitions can be, take a look at Google. They have gathered over 25 different definitions of SEO, each of which varies depending on the author’s purpose. There are also many facets and specialties within the SEO industry but they all effectively have one goal: to get more traffic from search engines.

Why SEO?

To better have an understanding of SEO, one should know the purpose of search engines and how they work. Search engines gather data from available websites around the internet using their hunter programs called “bots” or “crawlers”. They then take this information and store a copy (or “cache”) of everything it finds in a very large database (usually refered to as the search engine index). It then takes external data it finds, such as the history of the page, links coming into the page from other sites, and many other signals of data, and adds a value to each individual page. When you search for a term, the pages returned to you are ranked by a formula (called an algorithm) using that value and other metrics to attempt to return the most relevant information that you are looking for.

For an easy to understand analogy, think of the search engine index as being like your local library. Each book would represent a website, while the pages within the book symbolize web pages. It is the librarian’s job to organize and store the information in the library. When you, as a patron, come in and search the “index” for a topic you are presented with a list of books, and in many cases pages, that are relevant to your search.

If you were an author, you’d want your information to be read often and referenced regularly. This could possibly translate to more people purchasing your book or other books your wrote, readers passing your book title on to a friend, and possibly future writing contracts. It is important to you that people be able to find your book easier because book writing is your livelihood.

So it is the same with webmasters. Webmasters, businesses, and site owners are all highly interested in SEO to help bring more visitors to their site. Their business and livelihood generally are dependent on users finding their website and buying an item, signing up for a membership, clicking an ad, or some other form of monetization.

Search engines visitors are highly sought after by website owners mostly because one step of the sales process is removed. It was the visitor who was searching for an item or information, and they came to you! The website owner didn’t have to go out and find the person or rely on a referral for a lead. Instead, here’s a potential customer sitting in their doorway knowing exactly what they want. Search engines can be powerful sales agents.

How to do “SEO”?

Search engine optimization isn’t something to step into light heartedly. However, the basic concepts of easy are easy to learn and implement. With a little practice and a little persistence, its very possible for most small website owners to perform basic search engine optimizations for their own sites. While an expert would most likely be able to perform more efficient and better optimized SEO for your site, you still can get started on your own for a very small budget.

The scope of how to perform SEO is too large to cover in this article. Search marketers have different individual methods with which they practice to optimize a site, but it usually consists of enhancing the usability for both human readers and search engine programs (usually called “bots” or “crawlers”). If one succeeds at providing the same information to the search engines as they do to human eyeballs, then they will be off to a good start at optimizing their site for individual keywords and topics. In future articles on AskTheSEO.com we will be addressing the more finite processes of search engine optimizations.

How much does SEO cost?

As mentioned earlier, an individual webmaster that is willing to get his/her hands dirty can start performing basic SEO methods to his/her website for little to no cost. As the site and needs start to grow, the budget can still be minimal to perform monthly maintenance tasks like adding new content to the website and finding external links to link to the website.

However, if a company chooses to hire a third party SEO firm (or individual SEO consultant), the costs can range from a few hundred dollars a month to a hundred thousand dollars per month or more, depending on the website size and business goals. I always recommend getting more than one quote from different SEO firms, as well as getting a second opinion from a neutral third party. Most SEO firms are very reputable and offer solid services and delivery, however there have been some SEO houses that have given the industry a difficult time. Always get another opinion before signing any contracts.

The Future of SEO

Search engine optimization is a constantly changing industry. Search engines are constantly evolving and the methods used by SEOs to optimize websites are constantly improving. The future may expand beyond the scope of using search engines on our computers, to using them everywhere on our cell phones, in grocery stores, in our cars, etc. Who knows where SEO will be 5 years from now. In my opinion, local search (similar to online yellow pages) will be a large piece of the market, as will social and people search. But that is my limited perspective. It’s difficult to know what all those search engine engineers are cooking up today that will be released years down the road tomorrow.