Every website owner wants more traffic through its digital doors. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the crucial first step towards that end. SEO is the process of customizing various elements within your webpages so that your site will rank higher in the search engines.That being said, lets quickly explore an important aspect of search engine operation. Search engines use programs commonly referred to as bots, spiders & crawlers to comb the internet’s countless websites. Once a bot lands on a webpage it scans that page and stores the results in a database. When this scan is complete the bot identifies all hyperlinks on the page and follows the links to scan those pages as well. In this way, search engines build a comprehensive database which mirrors fairly accurately the current state of the web. Next, a set of equations known as algorithms are used to filter each webpage and give it an appropriate score or rating. The higher a page scores, the higher its position will be relative to other sites in the search results. The closer a webpage is to the top of the search results, the more traffic that site will receive from that engine.

All search engines are based on the fundamental concept of keywords. A user visits a search engine. Keywords are entered by the user. The search engine identifies the keywords, searches its database and returns a set of results to the user. These results generally contain a title, a description and a link to the site. Within each webpage certain elements known as meta tags may be configured to hold all this information. There are meta tags for keywords, titles, descriptions and various other items important to search engine optimization. Search engines use these meta tags to quickly identify relevant information about your site. When it comes to SEO I like to say, “I never meta tag I didn’t like.” A bit of nerdy internet-marketing humor.

Another key to successful SEO is crafting keyword-specific body content. Body content is the text which is displayed within the various pages of your website. Keyword references within this content help search engines more accurately rank sites. Too few or too many keyword references on a certain page may hurt a site’s rank. This must be taken into consideration when writing website content.

This brief summary of search engine optimization is by no means complete. There are countless search engines, all with different algorithms and methods of determining results. One thing is certain. Performing proper SEO is an essential first step in any search engine marketing campaign.