SEO?!

SEO (usually rhymes with the word Google) is Search Engine Optimization, the technique (or art) of getting search engines to like your site more.

This is not an article about SEO, but more of food for thought about it. A lot of people make very good money out of the internet, and SEO is a big part of it. If you want people to go into your site and buy / click on ads for you, you need people to know your site exists. Now people usually think that the more you pay Google, the higher you climb on Google's search results. Well, the truth is, Google are good people, therefore they decide whose really the best, and not who pays them the most using several techniques - PageRank and search relevance. That's why many people pay a lot of money for people to do SEO on their sites - because they can't pay Google to do the same. The cool thing about SEO is that it can multiply your revenues by a factor of 10, even more sometimes, just because you show up a few places ahead of what you used to.

Google knows what to find because they're just smart. Smart people know how minds think and act, and that's how the magic is done. Google turns web pages into "mathematical equasions" (well, I can't find a better way to put it), and the pages are indexed using keywords from the page, depending on where the keywords in the page are and what they look like. (For example, keywords in titles have a stronger weight than keywords in small text). But, Google also wants to show you the most relevant pages by giving you the pages they think are better, and that's what makes Google the best search engine around.

Google's method of knowing which pages are better than others (and therefore, more relevant to the search) is the Google PageRank. PageRank is a number from 0 to 10 which means how good and informative your site actually is. Google PageRank is generated once in a while for each page using a lot of variables, such as how original the content of the site is, how often it is updated, how many people visit the page, and many many more techniques.

For example, If someone looks for the word "Flower shop", a page which might be interesting for the person who searched for it should contain the phrase "Flower shop". The more often the phrase is in the page, the more relevant it will be. But if the phrase will show up many times in the page in the same area in the text, it won't count. On the other hand, if the phrase will show up distinctively between very different paragraphs, the phrase will have a stronger signature in the page and will become a better search keyword.

The most commonly known and talked about technique to get a better PageRank on a page is by increasing the number of backlinks to it. The more people link back to your page, the more popular it is, meaning that it will get a higher PageRank. If the sites that refer to your site have a high PageRank, their "vote" will count even more, and your PageRank will be affected more. Using this technique to get you a higher PageRank is very easy (but expensive), just pay people with very well known web sites money so they will put a link to your site from theirs. But, if your site is really good and interesting, people with blogs or sites of their own will link back to your site, and you will get a higher PageRank without actually paying anyone to advertise your site.

Beware, If you do bad things, you get PR0'ed (PageRank 0), which means you'll show up at the bottom of the search.

So what is SEO actually? It's nothing but a technique to make search engines like you more. But eventually, SEO can be legal or illegal. Legal SEO is something that everyone can do. Read a few more articles about search engines, and you'll know how to make your site crawl up the Google ladder. Illegal SEO tricks fool search engines or exploit flaws that allow people to give their page higher PageRank or wider relevance with no good reason. Bottom line is, if you pay guys to do you SEO of that kind, you might get PR0'ed because Google can trace this kind of wierd behaviour.