What is SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is popularly known is the science or should we say the art of optimizing a website's content to make the website more visible on search engine results. It is often termed as the organic or unpaid approach to making websites search-engine friendly. The primary aim of SEO is to attract more users to the website and generally the more often and higher a website appears in a search engine's results, the more users it attracts.
As stated earlier, SEO is the organic or unpaid approach, which means that there is also a paid or inorganic approach to growing the user base of a website. The latter is done by paying search engines to obtain a guarantee from them that the website will definitely appear in the results that their search generates for the suggested keywords.
But we will confine ourselves to SEO which is not only our main topic of discussion but also a more relied upon strategy in search engine marketing. After all who would pay for a mere guarantee to appear in search engine results, when there's no guarantee of how high it would rank in the search results. If you are on page 10 of the results, you can bid goodbye to your chances of high visibility.
Therefore SEO is extremely important for high visibility of a website on search engine results, which today account for a large pie of the mindshare and wallet share of the end consumer of various products. According to a survey by survey expert Etailing in 2010, 57% of respondents started their research on a product or service through a search query. While that number may have definitely increased since due to growing Internet penetration, it is a synch that 57% of your potential market today can be accessed through search engines. There's no gainsaying the fact that SEO is extremely important to organizations' marketing strategies today.
Now that we have established the importance of SEO, let us consider the key methods adopted in optimizing a website for search engines. It basically involves editing the content and at times the HTML code to incorporate certain keywords preferred by the target audience while searching in a particular context. For example a website selling women's fashion accessories will have to incorporate keywords that women most often use to search for these products.
SEO also involves removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engine bots, or computer programs, which search engines use to scan the content of a webpage and index it for generating results.
Since search engines have started granting prominence to the number of links that a webpage has, cross-linking has also become an important SEO strategy. Cross-linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages can result in the website ranking higher in relevant results of a search engine query.
Remember however, that search engines have complex algorithms that can easily detect invalid links or links that are merely there to fool search engines into granting a website a higher search rank. Therefore this approach which search engine giant terms 'link farming' should be avoided in an ideal SEO approach.