Search Engine Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of making changes to your websites or using external services and practices to improve your sites search engine ranking for certain keywords. This is usually conducted to build brand recognition and traffic to the desired website for the desired keywords.
Any website owner with a basic knowledge of HTML can do SEO and once you get the basics down it is very easy to make it happen.
It however takes hard work, patience and consistency in order to see results. It is often boring and since the results don't show up immediately, a lot of webmasters give up and look for short cuts.
The principles of SEO are often debatable, as the search engines, especially Google stays a step ahead of webmasters who try to rig their way into high rankings without meeting the criteria for high rankings which is useful unique content. Hence Google frequently changes it's ultra secret algorithms and updates it's index which leaves some webmasters gasping for breath.
Google is unarguably the king of search engines and is often the target of search engine optimization efforts. However, the principles for getting high rankings are pretty much the same across the major search engines, as all have one thing in common; the drive to ensure that visitors get the most relevant search results each time they visit.
Google came from behind to beat Yahoo! and MSN primarily because Google developed a software (crawler and spider) that crawled the whole page rather than only the meta tags, and developed an algorithm that delivered the most relevant results. The net effect was that over time, people came to realise they got better quality of results with Google than the other search engines. Word went to town, and the rest as they say, is history.
Because of the position of Google, most SEO is centered around what webmasters/SEO experts believe is Google's criteria for ranking sites (algorithms). There are many theories afloat, but in terms of long term results, nothing beats unique content.
It is critical to have this understanding of what the search engines are looking for, for it is in delivering this time and time again that you get to remain on top over the years, despite algorithm changes, because the search engines are looking for sites like yours. If you look for a short cut, you will not last at the top.
If you have a new site, you make not rank highly in Google index immediately for certain keywords. The reason for this is that Google have a sandbox filter that will prevent any site from ranking well for very competitive
terms for at least 8 months, sometimes even more. The main reason being that Google believes that sites start small and grow over time (both content and incoming links).
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