Jeremy Hutton

Search engine optimization (often referred to as SEO) is the process of optimizing your website for proper indexation and ranking for search engines with the goal of maximizing traffic.

This often includes efforts to improve a websites organic search rankings on Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Ask, and other major search engine indices by improving keyword relevancy and targeting specific keyword phrases so that a website shows up on the search engine results page (SERP) for those terms.

Although keyword optimization is the most well-known search engine optimization effort, it is not the only one. Optimizing a website for search engine indexing often includes making sure proper technology is being used to allow spiders to crawl the entire website and index all the necessary site content. Since content is the primary way in which search engines catalog a website it is crucial that any successful website use effective spidering methods.

Content optimization is another crucial component of search engine optimization that involves creating or modifying website content by adding keyword phrases in order to get ranked higher for those specific keywords. This could mean 1) creating new content that visitors are looking for on your website (that is relevant to your product/service) or 2) researching what key phrases visitors are using to find similar content and infusing those phrases into your web copy.

Meta data optimization is the process of optimizing a single web page’s meta data (meta keyword tag or meta description tag) to use specific keywords or keyword phrases for better search engine indexation.

Whether your search engine optimization stretegy is to use all or just a few of the methodologies above, everyone agrees that over all good website usability is good search engine optimization.