Search Engine Optimization (which from now on I will refer to with its acronym SEO) is the process of making a specific page on a website rank for a target keyword in the search engines.  When you visit a search engine like Google and perform a search by typing in a keyword and hitting the enter key, you're presented with the top 10 results.  For many keywords, the process of SEO was involved to make those websites rank for that keyword.  When you're able to successfully make a web page rank for a target keyword, you gain valuable and consistent traffic from which you can generate income from (in both publisher / service / affiliate marketing based methods of monetization).


How it Works

    Every search engine has what are called "spiders".  These spiders are simply other computers that "browse the internet" that crawl new and existing web pages.  These spiders look for several things when it looks at your website.  It looks at all of the content on your website (indexing the words / phrases and tags), and they also look to see which websites you're linking *to*, and other websites that are linking to *you*, along with the anchor text used to link to your site (which is called a backlink).  Anchor text is the text that is usually underlined that you click on to view another page or website. 

    When another website links to a page on your website with a specific keyword for the anchor text, search engine spiders take note of this.  It makes them "think" to themselves that if these websites are linking to this specific page, using this specific anchor text, then this page must be a good page to rank for that search term.  And it will rank your page according to other websites that are also suitable for that keyword.  Search engines automatically analyze the data that is crawled from their spiders, and rank the results accordingly.  The factors that effect ranking for a given term are On-site SEO and Off-site SEO.  On-site SEO is all of the content that you control on your website.  From the wording, to the HTML tags you use.  Off-site SEO is simply an analysis of other websites that link to yours.  On-site SEO and Off-site SEO are covered in their own sections proceeding this overview.

Consistent Traffic

    Achieving high rankings in the search engines provides you with a very consistent flow of traffic, day to day, week to week, month to month, and even years to years.  I have many different web pages that rank for a lot of keywords, and the great thing about SEO is that once you're able to make your site rank for a keyword, it very seldom drops its high rankings; and you don't have to put in any work towards maintaining those rankings.  I have ranked within the top 3 positions of some keywords for over 2 years and haven't done any SEO work to them since.


It takes patience!

    One drawback to SEO is that it takes time.  The more competitive a keyword is, the more time it will take to rank for that keyword.  It will typically take a few months to rank for your average term.  If you're starting a new website it becomes a little bit more difficult to rank for certain terms because search engines prefer to rank websites that have established some longevity.


It takes some work!

    Since the top 10 listings (and those beyond the top 10) are placements on the search engine which you don't have to pay for, it takes some work because other webmasters are often competing for those terms.  The work involved in SEO can be categorized into two parts, On-site SEO and Off-site SEO.  Usually the most difficult aspect is Off-site SEO, which is the process of gaining backlinks.  But don't worry, it's not rocket science!


    In the following sections I will discuss exactly what On-site and Off-site optimization is.