So as Your SEO Mentor I feel that the first basic thing I should teach is what SEO is and give you my definition of the word.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website through an extensive mixture of tasks that help improve a website’s presence on the search engines.
Again this is my own definition of SEO, but to better understand what SEO is you have to understand what a Search Engine is:
A search engine is an extensive database that uses algorithms (the way information is collected) to pull information quickly and efficiently, making information easily available. A person using a search engine will specify criteria (keywords/phrases) about something they are interested in for example “Real Estate”. When a person enters their search criteria into the search engine they hope to find information that is most relevant to the keywords entered. This is the main goal of a search engine, to give its users totally relevant results of their search criteria.
A really quick answer to what a search engine is by asking you to get on the internet and visit Google.com, Yahoo.com, or MSN.com. These are the most popular and Major Search Engines. Now you might think this is silly but the first mistake people make when they are learning SEO is that they do not understand what a search engine is or how it works.
Let me quickly give you an overview of how a search engine works:
Search Engines use robots or spiders, which are software that gather information and bring it back to be analyzed at the main Search Engine Index or in simple terms the main central database that stores all the information. This process in which the search engine spiders gather this information is called “Crawling”, or “Spidering”. Here is the best way we could think of explaining this process. Imagine a spider family that needs to gather Food (in the case of the WWW think of food as the HTML text on your website) to bring back to the main spider-web (Search Engine Index “Database”). The spider uses a highway (HTML Links on Websites) to gather food faster and more efficiently. Once the spider has gathered food, it then takes it back to the spider-web (Search Engine Index “Database”). Now the information is sorted out, and the Search Engine uses this information to help the user find what he or she is looking for. So when someone searches “Real Estate” the Search Engine will provide results that are most relevant from its database. Note: Search Engines are constantly changing the way their spiders collect information and how it is stored in their Index, this is why it is so important to stay up-to-date on changes and techniques.
Well I hope this has given you a little overview of what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is. Stay tuned for more from Your SEO Mentor on the process of SEO.
Filed under: SEO, SEO Mentor | Tagged: Definition of, Google, learning seo, MSN, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Mentor, Yahoo | 2 Comments »
