Search Engine Optimization is a very major part for a website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one's site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay.

SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the World Wide Web. Without sophisticated search engines, it would be virtually impossible to locate anything on the Web without knowing a specific URL. But do you know how search engines work? And do you know what makes some search engines more effective than others?
When people use the term search engine in relation to the Web, they are usually referring to the actual search forms that searches through databases of HTML documents, initially gathered by a robot.

There are basically three types of search engines: Those that are powered by robots (called crawlers; ants or spiders) and those that are powered by human submissions; and those that are a hybrid of the two.

Crawler-based search engines are those that use automated software agents (called crawlers) that visit a Web site, read the information on the actual site, read the site's meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to performing indexing on all linked Web sites as well. The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine.

4 Easy Steps to get started with Search Engine Optimization

Identify the keywords, i.e., words or phrases using which your potential customers will search the web. Example, if you are a hair salon, they will probably search using the keywords "hair cut", "hairstyle", etc. After identifying and gathering a set of keywords, categorize them under various themes and write web contents on those themes. That is, under the "hairstyle" theme, you can put keywords such as hairstyles, crew cut, long cut, short cut, curly cut, layered cut, etc. Using a Keyword Suggestion tool, you can see how many people search for a certain keyword. Any keyword for which the number of listings is less and the number of searches is more gives you a better chance of ranking higher than keywords for which the listings are more and the searches are less. Once you got the right keyword, use it appropriately in the page so that the page appeals to both the visitors and the Search Engines.

HTML tags such as title tags and meta tags also play a role in ranking top on search engines. These tags must contain only relevant keywords. Neither fill these tags with keywords that don't appear in the content nor leave them empty.