You prob­a­bly see the term “SEO” just about every­where you look if you have spent much time on the Inter­net or read­ing about all-​​things-​​Internet. Many peo­ple have come to use the term rather loosely with­out really hav­ing a solid under­stand­ing of what it means. If you have ever asked your­self, “What does SEO stand for?”, the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion can help illu­mi­nate the mean­ing of the term for you.

What SEO Stands For

“SEO” stands for Search Engine Opti­miza­tion — quite a mouth­ful of a phrase (and hence the pop­u­lar­ity of the acronym). Let’s explore the term “Search Engine Opti­miza­tion” in order to get a han­dle on what it means to you and your website.

How Search Engines Work

Most peo­ple know what search engines are but are not exactly sure how they work. A search engine is a tech­nol­ogy whose func­tional goal is to make avail­able to searchers of infor­ma­tion that infor­ma­tion which is most rel­e­vant to the search terms they use. The phrase “most rel­e­vant” here is key, and this is what sep­a­rates one search engine from another: how each one deter­mines the rel­e­vance and impor­tance of the con­tent they serve up to infor­ma­tion searchers can vary widely.

Commonly-​​known search engine sites are Google and Yahoo!, who together dom­i­nate about 90% of all Inter­net searches today. Search engines are basi­cally made up of three main com­po­nents. The first is a set of autonomous agents called bots that basi­cally act as vir­tual librar­i­ans, con­stantly scour­ing the Internet’s bil­lions of pages and record­ing what they find. The sec­ond com­po­nent is an index­ing engine that stores key infor­ma­tion about each page found by the bots dur­ing their reg­u­lar searches. The bots then apply spe­cial algo­rithms to deter­mine how to pri­or­i­tize or rank these pages when some­one per­forms a search for a given term. The third com­po­nent is the search site itself where peo­ple go to per­form a search and then view the results.

Defin­ing “Optimization”

The algo­rithms men­tioned above are really the “spe­cial sauce” for any given search engine. There is no pre-​​ordained way to rank con­tent based upon rel­e­vance, so search engine com­pa­nies are always com­pet­ing to come up with bet­ter algo­rithms that allow them to bet­ter clas­sify and rank the con­tent found by their bots. This is where opti­miza­tion comes in: by opti­miz­ing your site for cer­tain search terms or key­words, you are basi­cally slant­ing the odds in your favor that your site will come up higher than do web­sites com­pet­ing for traf­fic from the same search terms.

Impor­tant foot­note: Search Engine Opti­miza­tion refers only to efforts to improve the nat­ural or organic rank­ing of your site; it does not refer to the prac­tice of pay­ing to drive traf­fic to your site, which is known instead as Search Engine Mar­ket­ing, or SEM.

What SEO Means to You

SEO is both an art and a sci­ence. It is a sci­ence because so many of the ele­ments that make up a search engine opti­miza­tion cam­paign can be quan­ti­fied and ana­lyzed numer­i­cally. That’s the won­der­ful thing about the Inter­net: online activ­ity is emi­nently mea­sur­able. On the other hand, it is an art because there is no one, sin­gle for­mula for achiev­ing strong rank­ings. Rather, some­one engag­ing in this prac­tice must take a savvy approach, com­bin­ing common-​​sense tac­tics with their own cre­ativ­ity in order to com­pete with other sites for the best pos­si­ble rankings.

In gen­eral, SEO involves a com­bi­na­tion of two things. First, you must opti­mize your web­site itself by pay­ing atten­tion to the vis­i­ble con­tent, invis­i­ble con­tent (meta tags), site struc­ture, for­mat­ting and other items. Sec­ond, you must work to build as many back­links from other rel­e­vant, high-​​profile web­sites as pos­si­ble. Search engine index­ing agents take all of this into account when deter­min­ing how to rank your site for a give search.

How impor­tant is rank­ing well for rel­e­vant search terms? Well, it can lit­er­ally trans­late to money in your pocket if your web­site rep­re­sents a busi­ness or is an e-​​commerce site offer­ing online trans­ac­tions. A smart SEO strat­egy starts with an SEO Audit: a thor­ough analy­sis of your web­site to ana­lyze key ele­ments such as: for which key­words is your site cur­rently opti­mized? Are there issues with the pro­gram­ming code or struc­ture of your site that could impede search bots from review­ing your site?, and What is the quan­tity and qual­ity of back­links to your site?

Start any SEO cam­paign an audit to make sure you are embark­ing on your jour­ney well-​​equipped and that you are headed off in the right direction.

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