What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the art of producing web pages that are attractive to the search engines.

The better optimized the page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in major search engine results. This is especially critical because most people who use search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, only look at the first page of the search results. For a page to get high traffic from a search engine, it has to be listed in that first page.

Search engine optimization focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page has appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the page are distributed throughout the content in a way that the particular search engine will like.

Search engines find and catalog web pages through spidering software. Unfortunately, not all search engine spidering software works the same way, so what gives a page a high ranking on one search engine may not give it a high ranking on another.

One of the things that search engine optimization specialists do is keep track of all the changes in search engine operations so they can optimize pages accordingly. They also keep up with changes in the different search engine submission policies.

When you choose a designer to create a business web site, you should ask him or her about search engine optimization, as search engine optimization should be built into your pages. While it's never too late to optimize or tweak pages that have already been published, it's a lot easier and more sensible to include search engine optimization when the page is first written.