Search Engine Optimization Explained

My parents, and up until quite recently, my wife struggled to figure out what it is that I do “on the internet” for a living and why all of these companies are always calling at odd hours of the night? I have finally found a simple way to explain what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is and why it is important for any person or business who runs a website on the internet. Since you’ve come this far and are reading this on my SEO page, you are probably already aware of what a search engine is. Some great examples of such search engines that you may have used or have heard of are Google, Yahoo!, Bing (MSN), Ask.com, Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, etc. There are many others with various flavors of search algorithms and different methods of delivering data to the end user (you – the searcher), but the big ones are the most important ones, since they get the majority of the traffic and queries. (A query is a technical term used by geeky internet guys describing the keywords that a user types into the search engine to look for results.) In my years of search marketing and optimization consulting I have found that we really need to focus on only three main search engines to get approximately 98% coverage of all search queries. The big three (as you may have already guessed) are: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

“Why do I need to know this?” – you may ask yourself; well, the answer is simple: we have started talking about what search engine optimization (SEO) is and now that we know what a search engine is all we have left with is optimization – and what it really means. Optimization is usually defined as a process of making something better or perfecting something that has already been made. In some sense, this definition holds true for SEO. As search engine “optimizers” we perfect and make your (or your business’s) website better from the search engine’s standpoint. In reality your website is just a multitude of lines of code that when fed into a browser (such as Internet Explorer, FireFox or Safari) transform into a pretty page with buttons, links and pictures. What some people are not aware of, however, is that not all of the page HTML code is used to display the website in the browser’s window; some of that code is actually used for other purposes which may be: user activity tracking, java script loading, SEO optimization, and much more.

Here is where the magic happens: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that requires careful planning of the layout, code, keywords, tags and many other attributes within that page’s HTML code so that the search engines (and their crawlers) are able to quickly and easily gather information about your website and present it in the proper order to the searcher when they type in their search query. Unfortunately the story doesn’t end there – SEO is not only about placing pretty tags and well positioned lines of code on your pages, but it is also about impressing the search engine’s crawling system to recognize your website as being relevant to the content that is searched for. There are many techniques and tools that help you as a webmaster and as a website owner to make your site visible and accessible to the crawlers, but for the purpose of understanding what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is – crawler optimization is a separate topic, which I will touch on in the future.

In conclusion, if someone asks you what Search Engine Optimization is, you should be able to simply say: “It is a process of optimizing a website by various methods in order to impress search engine crawlers and spiders and therefore improve the website’s relevance and position rank on the search results page.” You will be pretty close on the money with that answer and that answer will usually quickly change the topic of that dinner’s conversation.

There are copious other methods and techniques that we use to optimize your website (meta descriptions, title optimizations, keyword lists, sitemap optimizations, website submissions, crawler optimization, link structure and category optimization .. the list goes on and on …), for additional questions or help with your own site, drop us a line:


Sergey Gorbatov
Principal Consultant, Sell With SEM
info@sellwithsem.com