Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is
basically the science of positioning yourself online in such a way that you are
easy to find. A website that is easy to find attracts more customers, and all
SEO is targeted towards this singular goal. “Online” in this case means Google,
which is the biggest search engine in the world, and which by all indications
is growing with no competitor in sight yet.
Google is in the business of organizing and
presenting information; their revenue model is based on offering good, well
organized information through helping websites compete to be on the first page
of a search.
In other words, it’s a library, and authors
of books can do some things that will help them be found more easily be
readers. Google indexes information, and that’s why when you Google something,
the results will come showing you how many hits it was able to find. These hits
are organized along the lines of popularity and structure of a website.
To help you gain popularity, Google gives out
guidelines of what they are looking for to make people find you faster and give
you better ranking. The most relevant are:
·
Good information, for which they provide a
structure and guidelines.
·
Links both in and out of a site. A site that has
popular links leading to it and popular links leading from it will be
considered popular by Google. To help with this, they have developed
backlinking, where certain very popular sites, especially news sites, are
willing to host information for you either for free or for a small fee. Linking
to this list of sites will significantly improve ranking.
·
Website structure, which is based on how well
the code for your website is structured for Google. Google again provides
guidelines as to what you can do to make your website as optimal as possible.
·
Google Pay Per Click promotions which is a paid
service offered by Google. A website owner will pay a certain amount of money
to have their ad appear as a link on relevant pages, and each time the ad
(link) is clicked on, Google gets some revenue while the user is led to the
website of the person who bought the ad. This is an expensive approach.
Google uses software, called spiders, to
search for the combination of these 4 things. Since spiders are software, and
are programmed to look for certain fixed variations, a website owner has to
follow the rules if he wants spiders to favor his website.
