What is SEO - According to Wikipedia?

Search engine optimisation (U.S. spelling is optimization), commonly referred to as SEO, is explained in detail in Wikipedia here.

What is SEO - According to Google?

Google provided their own SEO starter guide which you can read here. Initially written for their own internal purposes, Google made it public to assist webmasters globally (and is therefore one source of evidence that Google supports the practice of SEO, provided its guidelines are observed).

What is SEO - in Layman's Terms?

Search engines such as Google are essentially agents or market makers that attempt to match or 'introduce' people who want to find or buy something with people who want to provide or sell the same thing. The basic concept is the same as with any market where buyers and sellers need to find each other. It's just that the practicalities of search engines are far more complex because of the sheer numbers of people, diversity of services, locations, languages etc. found on the internet.

If you were to type one or more words (known as keywords) into Google's search box, Google then has the task of working out which websites to show you. Their goal is to give you the best chance of finding what you want as quickly as possible.

To take a simple example. If you type "holidays in spain" into Google's search box, before Google can show you any websites, it first has to work out which websites are most likely to give you what you want. Google's program, or search ranking algorithm, takes into account hundreds of factors about each and every website and uses these factors to choose which websites or pages are a good match for your search term (keyword) and then in which order to list them in its results.

So a website that has content (in other words, writing) on the subject of "holidays in spain" might be a good match. Of course, there are thousands of websites on the same subject so sorting them out into some sort of order of importance or ranking is a complex task.

The reason Google can provide these results in lightning speed is because it has already read, stored and ranked a record of most websites days, weeks or even months before you typed your search query. Taking a record of each website involves Google reading it (known as crawling or spidering), recording it (known as indexing it) and deciding how important and relevant it is to a particular search keyword (known as ranking it).

The hundreds of factors that Google takes into account are often broadly divided into two categories. The first category is often referred to as "on site SEO" and these factors include characteristics of the website in question, its content, background HTML code, the domain it is hosted on etc. The second category is often referred to as "off site SEO" (because these factors are not characteristics of the website in question) and includes things like "back links" or "inbound links". Back links or inbound links are hyperlinks that are on other websites which, when clicked, take you to the website in question. Back links into your website are considered by Google to be votes for your site and they therefore increase its status and improve its rankings (as a general rule). To be effective in search marketing terms, a website should have both its on site SEO factors and its offsite SEO factors optimised. In a not very competitive online market, onsite factors alone may be sufficient to rank well but usually it is not possible to rank number 1 for a highly competitive keyword without very good offsite SEO factors present.

What SEO boils down to is the employment of all these techniques to maximise sales or conversions. This means first maximising visibility of a website by ensuring it is indexed and ranks highly in the search engine results pages for chosen keywords and then ensuring as many visitors as possible convert into customers.

Need further explanation or guidance?

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