What is SEO?

as discussed in wikipedia

Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.


Why bother doing SEO?

Promoting your site via the traditional media (Radio/ TV/ Newspaper ads) is impermanent. Once the company running your advertisement pulls the plug, will people remember your URL? or simply will they be able to recall your company's name?

Your website could be your portfolio, product catalogue and your highly interactive business card. But if people couldn't find you and your business online via the Search Engines. Why bother putting up a website in the first place?


How do you Optimize a website for Search Engines?

This is one of many questions I receive whenever I attend Blogger-meets here in our country. I started out blogging in June 2005 and in which was getting 20 visits daily by friends, relatives and yes even my webhost administrator. The first answer they get from me is "Know how Search Engines work & give your visitors Relevant Content".

This I got from well known personalities in the SEO & Blog industry. Getting ideas for your site's content is not as easy as creating a header or a full flash layout. This may prove to be that a Search Engine goes by the saying "beauty is skin deep". It was hard for a budding Flash & Photoshop designer like me to swallow the truth about Search Engines. But when I learned that there are ways around it, I said wanted to learn more.

How Search Engines Work?

How search engines look at your site?

Search engines which are crawler-based have three major elements. First the spider, or also called the crawler. The crawler visits a web page, parses/reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is refered to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the site depending on its algorhythm or scheduled visit to see if there are any changes or updates to the page.

Everything the crawler finds goes into the another part of the search engine, the catalog. Well-known referred to as The index. It contains a copy of every web page (cache) that the crawler/spider finds. If a web page changes, then this index will be updated as well with newest content/ information.

It takes a while for this crawled pages that the spider finds to be added to the index. A webpage may be crawled a couple of times but it may not yet be indexed/catalogued. This is due to the Search Engine's algorhythm or qualities set for it's search engine to catalog the site.

The Search Engine program sifts/ parses the millions and millions of web pages recorded in its catalog to find the matches within the searcher's keyword.