Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is a term give to consultants and sometimes web designers who structure your html code differently on your web page (on page factors) and links from other sites linking into your site (off page optimization).
By doing this the optimizers hope that they will influence your ranking within the search engines themselves to be higher than other pages from other sites.
The search engines have the role of indexing and sorting the billions of pages from websites from around the world so that when a user types in a query the result will find a close match to the phrase typed in. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN employ no end of phd scientists, technical folks, mathematicians and other experts to develop an algorithm to present a relevant order of pages in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Having a number one position for highly searched terms can bring in thousands if not hundreds of thousands of visitors per month to a website, so it is a prized position to be in. That is why people are always trying to second guess how search engines rank sites so they may manipulate the rankings for their own sites. These types of webmasters are commonly referred to as “blackhat” (whereas webmasters following Google’s guidelines are called “whitehat”).
SEO is mostly a mystery and only a few people know how the search engines score pages to appear higher. Recently Google has been providing more information back to webmasters via Matt Cutts, a high ranking Google engineer who is the unofficial spokesperson - Google has many updates during the year (most notably page rank and backlink updates) - their algorithm also changes during the year so Cutts provides feedback when this occurs.
The SEO is for the “organic” serps (those results that are provided for free) because you can also pay (via pay per click, eg: Overture for Yahoo or Google Adwords) but of course most people would rather get results for free.
Most SEOs go through a similar process to bring a site up the Google SERPs and this includes keyword research, HTML code changes, meta tag changes, insertion of other tags (such as bold) and external link building. Although it has been know for a long time that links influence rankings, perhaps different methods such as latent semantic indexing (LSI) are also playing a part these days ?
