Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the web marketing technique utilized by many companies to improve their ranking across different search engines. The idea behind SEO involves having certain popular key words or links appear throughout a company’s website that will allow that company to rank highly when a prospective client searches for the key word online.
The mechanisms behind SEO are simple. Search engines rely heavily on text in order to classify different websites. A search engine “crawls” or scans the web after a person enters a key word to search and looks for a site that includes that word or series of words. The software involved is called a “crawler” or “spider.” A spider will take a key word and follow the links from one page to another and create an index along its way of the sites that contain these words.
Once a page has been indexed, when a person searches for a key word, the spider processes the requests and retrieves results based on relevancy to the pages it has indexed. However, there are many ways in which a search engine calculates relevancy. No two engines work the same and they constantly change the way they store and retrieve information. For example, engines like Yahoo! rely mostly on text within a website to rank it while others such as Google rely more on links.
