Wikipedia defines SEO or search engine optimization as
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or web page in the “natural” or unpaid (“organic”) search results of a search engine.
In general, the sooner (or higher ranked on the search results page), and the more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from search engine users. SEO can target different types of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
There are a number of assumptions implicit in an SEO marketing strategy, including:
1. Most potential customers who go online to search for a topic will use a search engine, Google, Bing, etc. to find relevant sites;
2. That most searches will generate millions of “hits”;
3. That most searches won’t go beyond page one, or possibly two or three of the search results.
These are not unreasonable assumptions in the first place.
Search engines use ‘bots’ to navigate through the millions of sites that make up the web and try to rank them against each other to decide which one to feature on page one, page two, etc. of the search results for any particular ‘keyword’. or sentence.
In the simplest terms, SEO consists of On Page and Off Page elements.
In the page
On-page optimization involves designing your page to be as attractive as possible to Bots and to be strictly relevant to the keywords attributed to the page. This has become less relevant as Bots have become more sophisticated, and in any case, the overzealous pursuit of this as an end has resulted in keyword stuffing that made the text difficult to follow.
Today, and as a starting point for your On Page SEO, it is better to focus on the quality of your content and its relevance to the “long tail” keyword phases rather than individual keywords.
As an example, consider the following Google keyword and key phrase searches and hit rates:
1. Television: 273 million
2. Flat screen television: 36.6 million
3. Sales of flat screen TVs in Leamington Spa: 449,000.
Bots look for quality in a page, so you need to be careful to avoid spelling and grammatical errors and make sure citations are linked to the source, and all images have ‘alt’ statements, etc.
off page
Off-Page SEO focuses on the Bot’s use of other sites as a source of information about the quality and relevance of your site. A site that ranks highly for your site is likely to link to it as a source of quality information. As an example, the citation featured in this article is linked (on our site) to the source page on Wikipedia, providing them with an inbound link.