Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to have a definition of what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is.

SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine ranking. A good SEO can be very difficult to achieve.

But why it is important? Your web site is much like that one person in the huge crowd. In the larger picture your site is nearly invisible, even to the search engines that send crawlers out to catalog the web. To get your site noticed, certain elements must stand out. And that’s why you need search engine optimization.

To achieve a high position in search results, your site must be more than simply recognizable by a search engine crawler. It must satisfy a set of criteria that not only gets the site cataloged, but can also get it cataloged above most (if not all) of the other sites that fall into that category or topic.

Some of the criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank your site should have in a set of results include:

• Anchor text
• Site popularity
• Link context
• Topical links
• Title tags
• Keywords
• Site language
• Content
• Site maturity

Getting indexed
The leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo! use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Yahoo’s paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren’t discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

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Tags: keyword, pagerank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO