What is SEO?

What is SEO? SEO is process of optimizing a website or web page to appear in the highest position possible of the un-paid search results of a search engine, such as Google or Bing, for a specific keyword or keyword phrase.

Un-paid search results are also referred to as “organic” or “natural” search results. Un-paid search results are based on the search engine’s algorithm which determines the most relevant web pages related to the keyword, or keyword phrase, that was searched.

Search engines don’t reveal how their algorithms work. However, there are some general techniques that can be applied to help improve the ranking of a website or web page.

What is SEO? SEO is an initialism that stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is pronounced by saying each individual letter, not as a word as in an acronym.

Another question I’m often asked along with “What is SEO?” is “What is search engine ranking?”, or “What does it mean for a site to rank in Google?”.

A site’s ranking in a search engine refers to the first position that a website or web page appears in the un-paid search results for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. A simple example would be if your web page appeared in the forth position of the un-paid results for a given keyword or keyword phrase, then you would consider that your ranking for that keyword phase. However, that ranking can fluctuate based on a number of factors such as browser settings, account settings, keyword or keyword phrase, location, etc.

When trying to determine how well your website or web page ranks for a specific keyword or keyword phrase I strongly recommend using a “clean browser”. By clean browser I mean web browser where there is no history, cache, and temporary Internet files, not signed in to any sites, and your location set to “United States” (or your current country). If possible, designate one web browser for testing, only use it for testing, and delete all data between searches. Then, verify using another browser. You go even further and use a proxy and test from a different location.

But, going back to our original question, What is SEO? Let’s re-cap: SEO is an initialism that stands for Search Engine Optimization, and SEO is process of optimizing a website or web page to appear in the highest position possible of the un-paid search results of a search engine, such as Google or Bing, for a specific keyword or keyword phrase.