Search Engine Optimization Explained In The Simplest Way

Search engine optimization is, in its most basic form, the art of building your website in such a way that when people use search engines to look for information related to what your site contains, they will find you at the top of the results. While search engines are a boon for people looking for information, the draw back is that they usually perform too well. While this may sound like a contradiction, the simple explanation lies in the fact that a search can produce a million results and how does one hunt through all this material? The fact is that they do not – they usually look only in the first few results and if they find what they want, stop there; so the higher your site appears in the search results, the more visitors you will get.

A search is done when people enter a keyword or phrase for the search engine to look for; the product of this search is pages of links to relevant websites. The ranking of your website in these results will depend on how relevant the search engine thinks your site is to the search terms. In other words, the more often the search term or word (the keywords) are used in the text in your site, the more relevant the search engine will think it is and the higher it will be placed on the result pages. This is an oversimplification because of all the complexities involved, but this is search engine optimization explained in the simplest way.

However, you must be careful not to over use the keywords because not only will the text in your site seem awkward and even unreadable, search engines are now very sophisticated and will remove any site that seem to be stuffed with keywords only for the sake of good search rankings. A website that sells coffee makers and uses these words 75 times in a page containing 700 words of text will be ignored by search engines because it is an obvious case of artificially forcing keywords to get higher ranking and has nothing to do with the relevance of the site. Of course, many “black” or unethical ways of optimizing a webpage have come up over the years, but with the advanced technology that the search engines use, things like link farms and hidden keywords are soon discovered and the websites indulging in this are banned.

Remember that the internet is crowded and full of competition and having a great website is no longer enough to get you the traffic you need. Having your site optimized is what will bring in the visitors. There is much more to optimization, but this is search engine optimization explained in a nutshell.