Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation 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. SEO can target contextual search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors. The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees of site owners who may perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective SEO can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.
On-Page SEO versus Off-Page SEO "On-Page" Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to editing the content and contextual elements of all of the web pages on a given website so that the various search engines can effectively index the site. After indexing a site each search engine uses proprietary, secret formulas to "rank" the site for each searchable word and term on the site. Once a given search engine has indexed and ranked a website then visitors to that search engine who search for words or terms that are located on the indexed website will be presented with a link to the page on the site where the word or term exists. The better the ranking of the website, the higher on the search results the link to the indexed site will appear. "Off-Page" SEO refers to the text and "inbound" links from OTHER web site pages to your web site pages. Off-Page SEO is very difficult to establish and maintain, but is critical in order to achieve top rankings on all of the popular search engines. Off-Page Factors are factors outside of your normal control of the content of your site. They are often referred to by search engine optimization experts as the "inbound links" to a given web site from OTHER web sites. The more inbound links to a site, the higher its ranking will be on most search engines. For example say an ecommerce catalogue site sells golf clubs online at BobsGolfShop.com, and a well-regarded Golf magazine web site "linked" to BobsGolfShop.com as a recommended reseller for golf products. The next time that the search engine analyzes the golf magazine website and notices the link to the BobsGolfShop.com website, then BobsGolfShop.com gets credit for an inbound link. Google makes it easy to determine the number of inbound links to a site by searching for links: