Creating an SEO Strategy, Part 1: What is Search Engine Optimization?
on
December 3, 2008
Creating an SEO Strategy, Part 1: What is Search Engine Optimization?
"The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us."
-Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil, 1995
Search engine optimization goes beyond traditional marketing and advertising by providing techniques to help a site increase its organic traffic (visitors from search engines) by increasing relevance and assisting the indexing activities of search engines. Search engines use special software to index, or record, the content of your site. Much like library patrons who find books based on title, author, or subject, the search engines find websites based on the unique words (keywords) we type in.
Relevance is a website's connection or affinity with the keywords typed into a search engine. Search engines calculate the relevance using a number of criteria, including how often those keywords are used, where they are used, and the site's relationship to other websites with similar keywords.
From this we can begin formulating the basis of our SEO strategy. These three foundational elements are: content, coding, and community. 
Content
People are searching for something- an answer, a recipe, a service, a product. Your content must use or pertain to the keywords people are searching for. Good content is the most important thing.Coding
Your content is supported by a scaffolding called code- the html used to structure and present your copy to end users. That scaffolding can be optimized to help search engines better index your website.Community
Your site isn't an island but is part of a larger community of websites that are related by mission, audience, and/or content. Being an active part of this community helps increase your relevance. In order to know who to appeal to and how to appeal to them it's best to start by being very clear with yourself and your website by asking:- What do we do?
- Who do we do it for?
- How do those people find us? What words might they use?
internet marketing (not verified) July 27, 2009
Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find Web sites. That's why a Web site with good search engine listings may see a dramatic increase in traffic.
Spanish property bargains (not verified) July 10, 2009
That's a very interesting pyramid diagram that SEO moz have produced. it sets everything out very clearly. Im new to SEO, so this was a very interesting article, thanks.
SEO (not verified) June 19, 2009
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural"search results.SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Bob (not verified) May 19, 2009
That's very insightful, I am a fresh memeber of SEO world so any information is real help for me. I am specially interested in organic seo, I need it for my work, do you have any source of information on that?
It is important to maintain a good amount of inbound links to the site. There are several ways to do that. One of the most common is blog commenting, like this. Anyway, great article!