What is SEO?
- Details
- Category: SEO Tips by SEO in Vancouver Blog
- Published on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 11:35
- Hits: 7511
A question that we get often is this simple one: What is SEO?
S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Almost everyone knows what a Search Engine is, the problem part for most people is the "Optimization" bit. For this we need to understand first how a Search Engine works.
-
Search Engines
Few people know this, but the first Search Engine was actually created in Canada. The reason why it was created has to do with retrieving information from very large databases where information is diffucult to find. If you have only a few files in your computer, it is very easy to find the ones that you need. You just look at the titles of the documents and find the ones that best fit your needs at the moment.
How about when you have 1,000 documents in your computer? It would take longer of course to find what you need simply by browsing through all the files. How about when there are 100,000 files in your computer? Of course it would take even longer. At some point it becomes simply impossible to find what you need in your computer if you have too many files.
One way to solve this problem is to categorize your files by topic, date, etc. In fact this is a very effective way to sort files and for a long time it worked very well. That is why there were so many directories a few years back, you could go there and find the documents sorted by type.
However as the number and variety of documents increases, it becomes very difficult and time consuming to categorize all documents by type. In fact what happens is that more resources are used to find a useful document than that document is worth.
This problem becomes very significant on the World Wide Web. In fact there are today over 600 Million Websites with almost 4 Billion web pages!!!! It is very difficult and time consuming to sort all these webpages by topic, date, etc. Here it is where Search Engines such as Alta Vista, Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc, enter the picture.
Search engines are essentially very large databases that store information about the entire World Wide Web. But they do it in a special way. They include markers, such as keywords, that tell the Search Engine what each webpage is about. For example Google knows that www.SEOinVancovuer.com is about "Vancouver SEO" because we have included that keyword and we have "told" Google that that is the topic of our website.
This is the essence of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Telling the Search Engines as much as possible information about your website so that is accurately "labels" it in it's database.
-
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
All fine you say, but I am just helping Google, what is in it for me?
Search Engines such as Google.ca have become the main portal for most people to browse the World Wide Web. Each day almost 200 Million people visit Google's websites looking for information. Good SEO can help you show up in the search results when these visitors are looking for related information or products.
Search Engines such as Google.ca, take each search query (the words that people type into google.ca) and then they check their database for the most RELEVANT webpages to show in the search results. That is, they take the search query (Keyword) and then they find All the webpages that are relevant to this search query. Then they take all these relevant webpages, and they RANK them starting with the MOST RELEVANT.
How do they do that, how do they rank all the millions of pages by relevance? Google.ca uses over 300 criteria for evaluating which webpages are the most relevant for each search. It is very important to be on the first page, because over 96% of all search engine users do not go past Page 1 in evaluating the search results. SEO in Vancouver can help you rank higher in these very important rankings, making sure that your website is visible to the hundreds of millions of search engines users.
-
How can SEO in Vancouver help you rank higher?
We have spent much time studying over the last 10+ years and understanding the nature of search engines and their rankings algorithm. We can help your website to get ranked higher in the relevance algorithm for the keywords and search terms that you want to show up for.
We evaluate your website in terms of the chosen keywords (The Niche) and then see if your website ranks well in the all-important 300+ criteria, and identify where there is room for improvements. We then work hard to implement these improvenets in collaboration with you and the web designer.
SEO in Vancouver should be involved already in the earliest stages of Web Design so that we can include all the necessary SEO into your website from the very beginning.
If yoyu have time, you can read more about the on page part of SEO at this user's page: