eCommerce Terms: What is SEO?
SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization," and refers to the process of ranking the various websites relating to a specific topic, subject, or heading on the web. From the point of view of a person or business with a website on the internet, the relative positioning in the list is extremely important in ensuring that the public comes across their article, blog or website. The higher on the list one's Web site occurs, that is, the higher its priority as compared to other entries on that list, the more likely visitors will be to click on their site. The concept of SEO may seem complex, but it is actually quite simple to understand.
How Does SEO Work?
When you want to do an internet search for a particular topic, you turn to Google, Bing, Yahoo, or some other search engine. To search for anything, you type in a word, phrase or even a full sentence or question. In response, the search engine brings up a number of webpages that it deems relevant to your searched topic. In general, when you type in your search topic, the search engine will provide the results it finds in a specific order that it considers most relevant to least relevant. For the person doing the search, this presumably provides the most likely sources at the top and then continuing down the list.
What Purpose Does SEO Serve?
Essentially, the practice of SEO produces more traffic to the highest-ranked, or top-listed, Web sites, articles, and blogs. The use and frequency of keywords in those sites' content will cause more people to land on them, based on the words or phrases a searcher enters into the search engine when seeking information on a specific topic. Writers who create that content customarily try to include certain keywords in their work to increase the likelihood that the content will appear when someone performs a web search on that topic. For instance, if you are writing for a website about the new iPhone from Apple, you will probably want to include certain keywords, such as "iPhone" and "iPhone features" a number of times throughout the article.
Role of Search Engines and How They Work
It is important to keep in mind that a search engine is not a person. It functions according to the same kinds of digital guidelines as a computer would. That said, if you are in charge of a Web site it is possible that, even with the use of SEO, a search engine may not assign much significance to your Web site content. A search engine utilizes what is referred to as a "crawler," that is, software that indexes and creates a database of all the content on the Web. Based on the search engine's internal rules for ordering all Web sites it finds under a specific topic, it prioritizes those Web sites in descending order of importance.
As for what those search engine "rules" are, you are certainly free to speculate all you want, but know that these are among the most closely-guarded secrets on the web today. Search engines go to great lengths to protect their rules, in an effort to guard against unfair manipulation by those who might want to alter the positioning of their Web sites under given topics.