Computerworld - DEFINITION: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring that search engines are more likely to find and access your Web pages. SEO's purpose is to improve the volume and quality of Web site traffic generated by searches.
If you have a public Web site, you want people to visit it. Whether its function is to disseminate information, promote shopping or other commercial transactions, or generate advertising revenue, your site won't be effective if no one sees it. Since most Internet users rely on search engines to find Web sites, good search listings can dramatically increase site traffic.
Everyone wants those good listings. Unfortunately, many Web sites appear far down in search engine rankings or may not be listed at all because their designers don't consider how people search and how search engines work.
Consider a typical query. Fire up your favorite Web search engine, type in the keywords you're looking for, and hit Return. In a few seconds, you'll be looking at the first few of a series of Web sites that fit your criteria. But how are these results generated? In preparing this QuickStudy, I searched for "search engine optimization" on
Google. It told me it had found at least 22,800,000 sites and listed the first 10.
Users generally assume that the most relevant entries will be presented first, but in fact each search engine uses different algorithms and selection criteria to rank the pages it presents. Thus, different engines will rank and present the same set of pages differently.
Users who are very determined in their research might explore beyond the first few entries or pages of entries. But if your site is buried down even a couple of hundred entries in that 22-million-long list, they'll likely never see it. This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, can make a big difference by improving the ranking a page gets.
How Searches Work Most search engines, such as Google, are crawler-based and create their listings automatically. They "crawl" the Web, looking at both the form and content of Web pages. Page titles, body copy, and coded instructions and keywords all play a part in this process.
Automated search engines don't just rely on how often they find query terms on a page. An important technique, pioneered by Google, is link analysis, which looks at how pages connect to one another. The general assumption is that a page that many others link to is probably more important than one that stands alone and thus it should get its ranking boosted.
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