SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

Understanding Why You Need SEO

Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to have a definition of what

SEO — search engine optimization — is. It’s probably a safe assumption that if you’ve picked up this

book, you have some understanding of SEO, so I’ll keep it simple.

SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine

ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization. But as simple as it sounds, don’t let it

fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s ranked in any given search

engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration. Good SEO can be very difficult to

achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.

But why is search engine optimization so important? Think of it this way. If you’re standing in a crowd

of a few thousand people and someone is looking for you, how will they find you? In a crowd that

size, everyone blends together.

Now suppose there is some system that separates groups of people. Maybe if you’re a woman you’re

wearing red and if you’re a man you’re wearing blue. Now anyone looking for you will have to look

through only half of the people in the crowd.

You can further narrow the group of people to be searched by adding additional differentiators until

you have a small enough group that a search querycan be executed and the desired person can be

easily found.

Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is

nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the Web. To get your

site noticed, even by the crawlers, certain elements must stand out. And that’s why you need

search engine optimization.

By accident your site will surely land in a search engine. And it’s likely to rank within the first few

thousand results. That’s just not good enough. Being ranked on the ninth or tenth page of search

results is tantamount to being invisible. To be noticed, your site should be ranked much higher.

Ideally you want your site to be displayed somewhere on the first three pages of results. Most people

won’t look beyond the third page, if they get even that far. The fact is, it’s the sites that fall on the

first page of results that get the most traffic, and traffic is translated into revenue, which is the ulti-

mate goal of search engine optimization.

To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by a

search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets the site cataloged, but can

also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic.

Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank your site should have in

a set of results include:

 Anchor text

 Site popularity

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Part I Understanding SEO

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