Yes, it can mean all those things but I’m only going to talk about Search Engine Optimisation here, because that’s what I do at Yahoo!7.

By definition, SEO is the art and science of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a web site from the ‘organic’ results of search engines. This is achieved by ensuring the content and code is ‘search friendly’ and the pages are effectively linked.

The ‘organic’ results (also referred to as ‘algorithmic’ or ‘natural’ results) are those that a search engine displays and orders based on their proprietary relevance algorithm, rather than the auction-style paid ads which are ranked depending on how much the advertiser bids per click (plus other factors).

Simply put, if you want more people to visit your web site you HAVE to think of search engines as your most valuable visitors – and if you’re not, you can be sure your competitors will be, if they’re not already.

I’d hope you don’t need much more convincing, but just in case:

• 100% of searchers view the top 3 organic search engine results, but only 20% reach the 10th site in the list.
• 49% of US internet users use a search engine every day
• Even CPG sites (Consumer Packaged Goods – generally the sort of stuff you buy in a supermarket) are reached using search engines: 60% for baby products and 47% for food sites.
• 63% of people bought things from offline shops following online searches
• Web searches led to 10 million travel purchases in the UK in just 3 months

You may even have found this page via a search engine, but have you ever wondered exactly how the results are ordered in the way they are? This question obsesses all search engine optimisers and much as I’d love to give you a simple answer, there really isn’t one. Let me give you a brief history of web search to put this into context.

Back in the pre-Cambrian era of the internet (the early 90′s) search engines had only a few million documents in their indexes and it wasn’t very challenging to spoof your way to a high ranking for almost any keyword phrase with a little effort. As the World Wide Web became available to ‘normal’ people (well, mostly) and broke free from the educational, research and scientific community, the number of pages on the internet grew exponentially – driven by commerce and increased access to connected personal computers. No longer could relevance based on meta data assigned by the author (such as the meta keywords tag) be trusted, making it difficult for search algorithms to sort the spam from genuine content. At this time you were more likely to find better results using a human edited web directory (such as the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ, the Open Directory Project). Web search technology was struggling to cope with the deluge of new data and high proportion of low value content.

Clearly, it wasn’t feasible to solve this problem using humans to classify every page so the ever-growing processing power of computers, coupled with the availability of increased bandwidth, was applied by some of our era’s brightest brains to reverse the decline in search result quality. As ways to monetise search were proven, investment increased. Algorithms became much more complex and ‘off-page’ factors (for example recognising the relative importance of links from other pages, where your site is hosted and calculations of how relevant inbound links are) made spamming the search index much less successful.

Let’s jump back to the present. Modern search engines now assess hundreds of individual factors to determine what a document is about and where it should be rated against others for a given query. I use the term ‘document’ because PDFs, Word documents, video files and other bodies of information can appear in a search result, not just HTML pages. It’s a significant challenge to spoof your way in and the penalties of getting caught doing so are costly. Of course, the cat and mouse game played by spammers will probably run for a long time, but it pays to play by the rules (for example, you should understand the Yahoo! webmaster guidelines).

With so many moving parts it’s impossible to reverse-engineer search algorithms to find the perfect recipe for success; the constant flux of competing sites, search engine servers that update at different times, the personalisation of results based on previous activity and your geographic location are just some of the factors that obfuscate the underlying process. This is why using an experienced SEO (search engine optimiser) or search marketing agency to help increase your search traffic can be the best investment you’ll make.

Over time I’ll write more about how to get started with your optimisation process and will include some useful tips, tricks and tools. If you have any specific questions or would like me to cover particular topics please let me know by leaving a comment.

If you have any questions leave a comment!

Aidan Beanland

Regional SEO Manager