How SEO Works
Search engines are very serious about basing their search results on relevancy - that's their job. The more relevant your website is to the searcher's keywords or search terms, the more likely you will be placed near the top of the SERPs. As a strategy for increasing the relevance of your website, SEO considers how search algorithms work and the relevant keywords pertinent to your market. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as altering the site to make it more search engine friendly. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, and ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engines.. Other techniques are employed, such as changing meta-data, placing your website in relevant directories, and link-building via blogs, articles, forums, contacting webmasters, etc.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of refining the volume as well as the quality of search traffic from search engines via "natural" search results for certain keywords. Generally, the higher up in the search engine rankings your business is placed, the more people will click on it. The success of your website is often closely related to its rank in search engine results.
Imagine that you've created a Web site on a subject -- say internet marketing. Your site is so new that it's not even listed on any SERPs yet, so your first step is to submit your site to search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The Web pages on your site include useful content, riveting images, helpful links guiding visitors to other resources and blogs on internet marketing, and free downloadable guides to internet marketing. Even with the best information about your subject , your site may not reach the top pages of major search engines. When people search for the term "internet marketing," they probably won't ever even see your site because yours isn't in the top results. See the image below where a search was done for "internet marketing" If you look to the right, you will see Results 1 - 10 of about 137,000,000 for internet marketing. This means that on the page you are viewing, you see the top results for "internet marketing" out of 137,000,000 websites that are competing for that particular keyword. You can see how difficult it is to compete to have your website in the top of the search engine rankings!
