Search Engine Optimization Explained Very Simplistically
Search engines are the way internet users search for information and making sure your website is easily found is the basic concept of search engine optimization. While they are necessary for people looking for information, the draw back is that they usually perform too well. While this may sound like a contradiction, the simple explanation lies in the fact that a search can produce a million results and how does one hunt through all this material? The websites that attract the most visitors are those that come up highest in the search engine results – if not at the top, then in the first page (or at least the second).
A search engine works by using the keywords that people type into it to look for relevant websites and when the search is complete, the engines produces pages of results. Where your website appears in these results will depend on how relevant the search engine thinks it is to the keywords it was searching for. In simple terms what this boils down to is that the more often the keywords appear on a webpage, the more relevant the engines thinks it to be and so the higher it is placed among the results. This is an oversimplification because of all the complexities involved, but this is search engine optimization explained in the simplest way.
Many people fall into the temptation of using the keywords too often in their web pages which not only makes the text look forced and unnatural, it also puts search engines off because the advances in search technology means that these engines can detect web pages that are filled with keywords, known as keyword stuffing, only for the sake of giving them a better ranking in the search results. For example, if your website is dealing with bed sheets and in the 600 words of text on a page you use the phrase bed sheets 80 times, the search engine will know that something is wrong and reject the page. Of course, many “black” or unethical ways of optimizing a webpage have come up over the years, but with the advanced technology that the search engines use, things like link farms and hidden keywords are soon discovered and the websites indulging in this are banned.
A great website is not guarantee of success – there is far too much competition to sit back and relax without making every effort to get traffic to your site. Having your site optimized is what will bring in the visitors. There is much more to optimization, but this is search engine optimization explained in a nutshell.
