What is SEO?

SEO. Three letters that could mean the difference between a profitable web business and a failed one. So what exactly is SEO?

Well, according to Wikipedia, search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines through “natural” (“organic” search results). or “algorithmic”) for specific keywords.

Basically, it’s about improving your website so that it appears near the top of search results for your chosen keywords.

In recent years it has become a big business and many people have made a lot of money either by optimizing their own sites or through the work they have done optimizing other people’s websites.

Like many profitable industries, the SEO market has seen (and continues to see) its fair share of people jumping on the bandwagon all claiming to be SEO experts.

There are many people who claim that it is very technical or very secretive. You will probably hear people claiming that they have cracked the Google algorithm. I doubt it!

To me, it’s pretty clear that for search engines to survive, they need to deliver highly relevant sites that match the searches their customers are doing. That way, their customers will stay with them. It is the model that Google uses. They are completely focused on providing their search engine users with highly relevant and high quality websites. Yahoo has been quick to follow Google’s example.

Therefore, many SEO techniques are based on the idea of ​​making sure that search engines can see that your site is relevant to your chosen keywords and that it is of high quality.

A word of caution, avoid what are known as Black Hat SEO techniques. These are techniques that attempt to trick search engines into giving a website a higher search engine placement than the website deserves. They usually rely on some exploitable flaw in the rules search engines use to determine how relevant your website is to the keywords you’re targeting. The problem with these techniques is that not only do they often promote websites that provide a poor user experience, but their high search engine rankings are often short-lived once the flaw they are exploiting is fixed.

If you want to try some ethical and successful SEO techniques, there are some pros worth listening to. Aaron Wall and Dan Thies are names I would Google for more information.