Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website through a broad combination of tasks that help improve a website’s presence in search engines. So this brings up the question, “What is a search engine?” This question can be easily answered by asking you to go online and visit Google, Yahoo or MSN. These are the most popular and top search engines.

A search engine is an extensive database that uses algorithms (the way information is collected) to extract information quickly and efficiently, making information readily available. A person using a search engine will specify criteria (keywords/phrases) about something they are interested in, for example “Real Estate”. When a person enters his search criteria into the search engine, he expects to find the most relevant information for the keywords entered. This is the main objective of a search engine, to give its users fully relevant results for their search criteria.

Now it is important to know how search engines work to understand the question “What is SEO?” Search engines use robots or spiders, which are software that collect information and bring it back for parsing in the main search engine index or, in simple terms, in the main central database that stores all the information. This process in which search engine spiders collect this information is called “Crawling” or “Spidering”.

Here is the best way I could think of to explain this process. Imagine a family of spiders that needs to collect food (in the case of the WWW, think of food as the HTML text on your website) to bring back to the main web (Search Engine Index “Database”). The spider uses a highway (HTML links on websites) to gather food faster and more efficiently.

Once the spider has collected food, it takes it back to the web (Search Engine Index “Database”). Now the information is sorted and the search engine uses this information to help the user find what they are looking for. So when someone searches for “Real Estate”, the search engine will return the most relevant results from its database. Note: Search engines are constantly changing the way their spiders collect information and how it is stored in their index, which is why it is so important to stay up to date on changes and techniques.

Keep in mind that on search engines there are sponsored links which are paid search results that are usually placed at the top, sides and bottom of natural search results. This is a completely different topic called Pay Per Click (PPC), so keep in mind that SEO deals with natural rankings and PPC deals with paid rankings.

Now that you know what search engines are and how they work, you can now better understand what SEO (search engine optimization) is and how it can help you. Here’s another good example using the spider analogy. Think of a person doing SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) on a website as the spider feeder. This professional will optimize the way the spider collects food. In terms of a website, the professional will optimize the website so that the search engine spiders can easily collect the required and relevant information.