The basics of SEO

I thought this might be a helpful starting point for SEO newbies. I'm going to talk about the basics, the real basics, of SEO; experienced SEO heads can look away now, you've been warned!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Wikipedia defines SEO as, "the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results."

These days, to be successful in many different industries, having a strong online presence is mandatory. Search engines have come a long way since the days of Alta Vista so in today's Google society (sorry Bing, Yahoo and you other contenders), being easily Googled is a critical measure of whether your website and/or business will be around for the long haul.

To put it simply, SEO is all about how to make your website come up as early as possible in response to a Google search for any key term relating to your business. It has become common knowledge that Google (and any other search engine) uses an algorithm to effectively score every website and every Google search that people do, which then allows Google to rank websites to return in response to the search.

An extremely simplified example would be, if your site was more x, y and z than other sites relating to what the search query is, then that means your site is more likely to come out on page one of the Google search results. Essentially, the algorithm has all sorts of variables that are considered by Google, and in summary, SEO is about optimising your website to score higher than all other similar websites in each of those variables.

Unfortunately, it seems that the algorithm is constantly changing; however, there seems to be three seemingly constant variables though: 1) content / quality; 2) trustworthiness of the site; and 3) authority / popularity.

Looking closer, it is all pretty common sense though. Google wants to produce the best search results for the user. It follows then that Google is more likely to rank highly those websites that are:
- High quality - good content is closely tied to unique, valuable and interesting content so sites that features content that is well-regarded and different to other websites will rate higher;
- Trustworthy - Google doesn't want to be sending its users to websites that are subpar. This is not just about malware and advertisements ad nauseum, but also about sites that aren't well reviewed by users of the internet. In short, you need to make sure your site is trusted by the common users out there; and
-Authoritative - it's unfortunate that these days, popularity dictates authority. The more popular your website is, the more likely it is to be considered an authority on topic XYZ by Google. This doesn't just mean getting high traffic to your site, but having a product that is rated five stars, by being connected and linked to other reputable and popular websites, and by having a reliable fan base to depend on (and so on).

So there's a real quick crash course on SEO. You've now been exposed to a whole new world so go on, go explore! There's so much great content on this forum to dig much deeper into the SEO world.