What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (seo) is a mechanism or procedure by which the visibility of a web page or website in search engines may be enhanced through unpaid or natural (algorithmic or organic) search results.seo improves the accessibility of your website or web page to search engines.seo may be regarded as a process of making a website or web page search engine friendly.

Search Engines are one of the most widely and primarily used instruments employed by the internet users to find websites and web pages on the internet. In order to properly understand what is seo,you first essentially need to understand how a search engine works.seo is a technique which makes search engines find and rank your website higher than scores of other websites on the internet as a result of user initiated search query. This is why a website having good search engine listings receives stupendously high traffic from search engines as compared with those websites which have poor search engine rankings.

Search engines are not humans and view web pages quite differently from the way the humans do.Humans,unlike search engines, are not text driven.Despite all the great advancements in Information and Computer Technology,search engines are not intelligent like humans.A search engine is blind to the content of audio,video or image files uploaded on the web page of a website.All the results that a search engine produces in response to the search query of an internet user,are mainly based on the analysis of the text based content of each of the websites that search engine processes while searching for the information relevant to the search query.A search engine usually goes through a number of processes before finally delivering the search results of a query to the  end user i.e.,crawling,indexing,processing,calculating relevancy and retrieving results.One thing important to note in this regard is that due to presence of a enormously large number of web pages on the internet,it is almost impossible for a crawler to visit a website on daily basis just  to figure out whether a new web page has appeared on the web or an existing web page has been altered or new information has been added to the web page.Internet sources claim that there are over twenty billion web pages present on the web.So due to this huge number of web pages on the web,sometimes spiders are not likely to visit your website for a month or even more.To improve the visibility of your website you need to analyse the content of your website critically and figure out what content is visible to the crawler and what content a crawler usually looks for on a website.As has been discussed earlier,crawlers unlike humans are simply blind to flash movies,images,frames, JavaScript,password-protected directories and pages.If your website is full of a content which the crawler cannot see,then this is obviously going to badly degrade the visibility of your website to search engines.Consequently the search engines would rank your website much lower than may other websites which are rich in text based content and keywords that usually are more visible to the crawler.Some websites,like webconfs.com,have free spider simulators installed on their web page,which you can use to spider your website to see how visible the content of your website is to the spider for search engine.If any content not viewable by the spider,lies on a website, then such content  will neither be crawled by the spider nor it will be indexed and processed by the search engine and thus such content will simply be non-existent for the search engines.

First a search engine crawls the web to analyse all the information relevant to the search query  that is available on the internet.The software which crawls the web is generally called spider or crawler,however in case of google this software is termed Googlebot.During the process of crawling the web,the search engine traces links from one web page to another and indexes every piece of information while following the links.

After a website has been spidered,the the search engine then indexes its content to store the indexed pages in a very huge database.The indexed web pages thus stored in the database are retrieved later on for displaying them in the web browser for the end user. 

In the process of indexing the words and expressions that best describe a web page are identified and assigned to appropriate key words. 

When a search query is generated by the internet user,using a particular search engine,the search engine processes the string in the search query.In this processing the search engine actually compares the search query initiated by the user with the pages that it has indexed in its database.It is highly likely that the database of the search engine contains millions of pages containing the string entered by the user in search query.In processing the search query the search engine establishes the relevancy of each of the web pages in its index with the string in search query.There are various algorithms that a search engine may employ to establish this relevancy.The performance of a search engine is greatly dependent upon how efficient and well developed a particular algorithm that the search engine employs is.Every algorithm is unique and assigns particular weights to various common factors like meta-tags,links or keyword density.This why the performance and search results generated by different search engines,like google,yahoo and bing in response  the same search query are may differ remarkably.This is why all major search engines periodically alter and improve their search engine algorithms so that they may deliver best results to their end users.If you want to make your website stand out from various other websites on the internet and  want your web site to stay on the top of the search results generated by major search engines mentioned earlier then you need to adopt your web site and web pages to the latest changes and advancements in algorithms of these search engines.This is what seo in actually meant for.     

The last step performed by the search engine in response to search query of the web user is to retrieve and display the searched results in the web browser used by the end user.The most relevant search results are supposed to appear at the top of the various search results finally displayed by the search engine.

So if your really want to draw a lot of traffic from various major search engines,then you need to devote serious and permanent efforts on Search Engine Optimization (seo).seo is inevitable in growing the popularity of your website among internet users.