What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of designing and tuning your website to maximize your findability and improve your rankings in organic (non-paid) search engine results.  To maximize traffic, one needs to take into consideration how search engines work when you design your website.  There are two ways of employing SEO.  The first, known as white hat SEO, refers to methods that are approved by search engines, do not attempt to deceive the search engines, and produce quality, long-term results.  Top white hat techniques for SEO include:  offering quality content, using proper metadata and effective keywords, and having inbound links from relevant high-quality pages.  Black hat methods are used to deceive search engines.  Although they may result in temporary improvement in search engine results, these tactics could get your site banned by the search engines.  A “Google bomb” (or link bomb) is an example of a black hat method—it attempts to trick the Google algorithm into promoting a certain page (generally for humorous reasons).

Another important SEO-related technique is optimization of the coding architecture of the website’s pages crawled by search engines.  Although this does not directly increase or decrease your rankings in organic search engine results it can impact how easily your website is crawled.  In other words, by optimizing your website’s pages you can make it easier for your website to be accessed by search engines and maximize the number of pages that are indexed from your site.  An example of such coding optimization techniques include coding website pages with what is known as standards-compliant or valid HTML/XHTML, a concept introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium.  Coding errors in a page may hide large amounts of your page content from search engines - even though human visitors see the content with no problem.