Introduction - What is SEO?

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.


What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

Definitions Of SEO

There are a ton of “official” definitions out there, but the best and most accurate one is from Wikipedia:


Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

In other words, SEO is the practice of ranking a webpage higher in the search engines. (Professionals who practice SEO are also called SEOs–Search Engine Optimizers.) How is this done?

A common misconception is that Google employees somehow decide which sites should be ranked at the top of their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). In order to do this, Google would probably need to employ every person living on the planet to work 24 hours a day, and even then it would be an impossible task.

The reason is because there are literally an infinite number of possible searches that anyone can make at any given time, and Google has to display over 1,000,000 results in order of importance in less than half a second:

On top of that, as the world changes so must Google, so every single day these results must be updated and re-ordered. Long story short: there needs to be a way to automate the process.

So as a solution Google has two main tools in its arsenal: an army of “spiders” and a very long algorithm.

If you want to know what SEO is, it’s crucial that you understand these two concepts. A search engine spider is basically just a robot that uses links to “crawl” from page to page. With enough spiders (and Google has tons), search engines are able to draw a map of the entire World Wide Web. These spiders record every word written on every page they crawl.

Google’s search engine algorithm is probably the most prized formula on the face of the planet. Even Coca-Cola’s secret recipe isn’t as closely guarded as Google’s algorithm. But what is it?
The brilliant whiz kids over at Google have come up with an extremely complicated formula that mathematically calculates how high a web page should rank for any given keyword. What the algorithm does is take into account a host of different factors, such as:

·         The number of links to a page (recorded by the spiders)

·         The quality of those links (calculated algorithmically)

·         The content of a website (recorded by the spiders)

·         The trustworthiness of a site (calculated algorithmically)

Google has stated that their algorithm takes into account over 200 signals in order to rank a web page. Although no SEO will ever know all 200 of these signals (let alone their relative importance), it’s our job to learn what the most important ones are and focus in on those off-page and on page SEO factors when optimizing a website.

So, in a nutshell, what is SEO? Good SEO marketing, at least, involves studying the SEO landscape, performing research on and discovering the most important rankings factors, and finally optimizing a website based on those factors. There are white hat SEO methods as well as black hat SEO methods, but in the end, they all count as SEO.