SEO – The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Search Engine Optimisation

Most E-Marketers and people who want to score with their websites would agree with this statement: A website is only as good as its hits. For those who merely want to have a website for their own log (not many of such would be around) or those who have launched a site exclusively for their friends and family, the statement, obviously, does not apply. The question is, how do you get people visit your website?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a bundle of techniques used to get your website up in the page rankings among search results. And that, as on date, is arguably among the best of techniques available to get your website seen prominently listed for user views.

For starters, Search Engines are nothing but spiders that crawl on the web looking out for information that you search for. And they pick up the most valid, usable and appropriate contents from the web for display among search results. As you may appreciate, though search results may be listed in thousands, page after page, not many of those who search would go through all the pages to get the information that they want – perhaps, it would be considered a good deal even if they went into the second and third pages among results. That precisely is the reason behind all the hoopla surrounding Search Engine Optimisation.

As you would have probably guessed by now, SEO is a technique that optimises websites to appear among the first of search results. To be ranked among the top ten among thousands of search results is considered good enough; the cherry, however, is to emerge the first.

The reason why SEO is considered so important is the way information is sought in the web. The most popular way to fetch information in the internet is through Search Engines – and this phenomenon is only expected to get more prominent and widely used in the years to come. Google is the dominant force in the Search Engine market, as Microsoft is trying all its tricks to play catch-up, teaming up with Yahoo and unleashing its own “Bing” Search Engine. The Search Engine market has advanced to look for localised information and domestic results as well, with numerous players jumping on to the local search engine band wagon.

We’ll explore in this space, the events and happenings in the search engine market and SEO technology as we throw light on the techniques to get your site listed in the first page of search results.