What exactly is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is the art of adjusting the various elements of a website to increase that website’s propensity to rank well for specific keyword phrases.  These various elements can be classified in one of three categories: On-Page, Off-Page and Site-Wide.

On-Page elements refer to the physical elements of the webpage being optimized and include the Page Title, Meta Description tag, Meta Keywords tag as well as the actual page content, including header tags like H1, H2, etc.   Ensuring that each of these elements contains instances of the targeted keyword phrases where appropriate, but not so many that it constitutes spam, is the fundamental idea behind the optimization of the On-Page elements.

Off-Page elements refer to the linking characteristics that a webpage has and what those links tell the search engines about the page.  Off-Page elements are divided into two subsections: internal linking elements and external linking elements.  Internal linking elements include how often a particular page is linked to within the site, how prominent those links are in the site architecture and / or main content blocks of the other pages within the site, and the link text that is used to refer to those pages.  Optimization of these elements includes ensuring that targeted keyword phrases appear within internal links and that the page that is being optimized is linked to from relevant parts of the site that reinforce the overall theme and keyword focus of the page.

External linking optimization refers to the act of increasing the link popularity of a website by marketing the website to relevant sites.  The most valuable links, in terms of which ones will have the biggest impact on search engine rankings, are usually given based on excellent content as Webmasters seek to link their sites to the best resources for any given subject.  However, given the number of websites that exist, it is very possible to create a website with outstanding content that does not get links very often, especially if it is a newer site.  Therefore, approaching other websites and asking them to link to yours based on the merit of your content or marketing the website in such a way that it encourages related sites to link to yours because they perceive the site as being of an expert nature is at the heart of external link optimization.   Prioritizing which sites to market to, based on their importance within the portion of the Web community that is related to the content of your site, is another fundamental aspect of this type of optimization.  Link acquisition is slow and often tedious work that requires an investment of resources.  Without the knowledge of how to prioritize linking opportunities based on their potential to increase qualified traffic and / or search engine rankings, link acquisition campaigns fail to produce any noticeable difference in search and thus generate a negative return on investment.

Site-Wide elements refer to the characteristics of the site architecture, including URL structure, as well as server settings and redirect settings that can cause problems for the search engines’ ability to correctly index the site’s content.   These types of issues include but are not limited to:

• Multiple URL paths that resolve to the same content which can be seen by the engines as “duplicate content.”
• URL structures which are problematic for search engines, including those with multiple parameters (usually more than 3 to 5).
• Javascript or Flash-based navigation that the search engine crawlers cannot follow.
• Mixing capital and lower case letters within the internal links of the site and, thus, creating potential duplicate content issues based on the engines being case-specific with regard to URL syntax.
• Canonical issues where the site gets indexed with different resolutions to the root URL (http://www.domain.com/ and http://domain.com ) as well as duplicate content caused by improper redirecting of vanity URLs.
• Third party advertising links that have not been correctly tagged with rel=nofollow.
• Session ID variables appended to URL strings.

Correct implementation of site-wide solutions is essential in making sure that the search engines can index all the content of the website, that there is only one URL path to any given piece of content, and that link popularity and Google Page Rank are assigned correctly throughout the website.

Adjusting each of these three elements in such a way as to rank higher in search engines for the keyword phrases which have the biggest opportunity to generate sales, leads or visitors is the gist of what search engine optimization is.