A Dummies Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This guide is written not from a perspective of an industry insider, but is instead aimed at a layman. Rather than getting bogged down in the intricacies of writing code to positively influence search engines, this article will take a step back from that and concentrate on the history of this discipline as well as some theory.

To start off with lets give a reason why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should matter to you. Lets say you are a small business that is selling shoes. You invest a couple of thousand dollars in a competently designed website. Your website is published but you receive no visitors and visitors equal money because they will hopefully be buying your shoes.

So in order to get visitors to your website you write a list about how you will publicize it.

At number one on the list is paying for advertising space in the print media, whether national or local publications, or niche magazines. Advertising like this has been done for centuries and clearly does work judging by the billions of dollars spent every year.

At number two on your list is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising which on the World Wide Web is mainly run by Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

You’ve all seen these types of adverts in Google search results: they always in the right hand column. It works as a bidding system. You pay, say, $1 to Google every time somebody clicks on your advert and visits your site. If you pay more than $1 then your advert will appear higher in the list and so consequently you will receive more visitors. The amount that you pay for an advert depends on how competitive your niche and keywords are. For instance, you will pay more to advertise with a keyword like “home insurance” (extremely competitive) than you would “Gardening Services in Salisbury, Connecticut” (not very competitive).

Done correctly PPP advertising will yield a financial return. This industry is called Paid Search Advertising and although related to Search Engine Optimization, it is a separate sphere in its own right.

Getting back to your list.

At number three is SEO. At the most basic level of explanation this means getting to the number one spot in the search engine results for your niche or keywords. Going back to the previous example then this means that if somebody types “Gardening Services in Salisbury, Connecticut” then your Salisbury-based gardening site is the first result in the list.

Why is being first so important? Won’t being number two or three or even number 27 on the third page do?

Time and time again investigations into people’s user habits revel that users are more likely to click on a result if it is on the number one sport. They are then more likely to click on the number two result than the number three result, but less likely to click on the number two result than the number one result. Simplified, the higher on the list you are the more visitors your will receive.

So how do you get to number one? And now here is the rub – the only people who can truly answer that question are the search engines themselves. They keep their formulas – like the Coca-Cola and KFC recipes – a secret.

This is because if they were completely open with their formula – technically called algorithms – then every two-bit spammer in existence would take advantage of this in order to get their Viagra or porn site to dominate the search engine results. Google would crumble into uselessness over night.