Many business owners and professionals work hard at trying to understand how the Internet works so that they might be able to utilize it for generating business. SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization". What does this mean? Which search engine is optimized? What is really optimized? The purpose of this blog is to answer these questions and help business owners increase their understanding of how SEO can fit into their Internet marketing strategies or ecommerce activities.
From a technical perspective, SEO describes the activity of designing the web pages of a website with techniques and recommendations provided by search engine companies. These specifications are published to inform the public about various rules that search engine software take into consideration when performing a search on the Internet. An important thing to be aware of is that it is the search engine software performing the search, not the user. Users enter keywords and send directions to the software to execute a search. This may seem like a basic point, but is important for understanding that although the user behavior is the same for every search engine, the algorithms that are used in a search engine application vary from company to company. The algorithms used in Google.com's search engine, for example, are different than the ones used on Microsoft's MSN.com search engine. Each company has its own special recipe that is proprietary to their organization. The competitive nature of the search engine business makes it difficult to "optimize" web pages to the fullest extent for all the existing search engines. The most important thing here, I feel, is to acknowledge that these recipes are directly tied to the performance and user satisfaction of the search engine and they are constantly being updated and modified. The end result is that maintaining SEO-friendly web pages for a particular group of search engines becomes a time-consuming process.
There are many ways to look at SEO from a business perspective. First and foremost, SEO is a marketing buzzword for search engine companies. It is a fundamental tool for their marketing strategy and corresponds directly to their advertising revenues. Traditionally, the activity of searching the Internet was limited to scholars, scientists and researchers. In the early 90's the World Wide Web was created and things changed. The first users of today's search engine giant, Google.com, were programmers and other technical folk. They enjoyed the simplicity of the homepage design and search engine interface, which is still the same after a decade, and the absence of any advertisements. Are there really no advertisements on Goolge.com? In the most basic sense, Google.com search results have evolved into advertisements. And to optimize your website for this "free" advertising is what SEO is all about.
As mentioned, SEO is a time-consuming process and that translates into costs. Whether you are doing the web page design yourself, or paying someone to do it, there is a cost. Moreover, what works well for one search engine, typically will not translate into the same results with another. So, it is important to identify target search engines and focus SEO efforts on that limited set.
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