How to define SEO? - Blog de Olivian Breda

First of all, SEO it’s an acronym for two things:

Search engine optimization (a process to “optimize” a web page);
Search engine optimizers (the persons that do the process above).

I detail both of these bellow.

1. SEO as “Search engine optimization” (the process)

Wikipedia says it it the meaning: one tries to improve both the volume (page visits) and quality (a good target profile visitors) to your web site and for this aim it does SEO. A good way to do this is to have a good positioning on Google. For example, if one does a search for “SEO” on Google, I’d really have a lot of visitors if only this very blog would be in the top 10 results. I’d have similar results for other search engines, like Live, or Yahoo!.

There are various way for a search engine to display results. Let’s take Google. We have web results, image results, local search, blog search, book search. Surely there’s a place for my blog somewhere (hint).

SEO process has basically two methods:

Internal SEO: Modifying the web site being optimized so that engines love to navigate it (term known as “crawling” or “spidering”); You can imagine the search engine as a machine trying to understand what your web site is about; It has limitations (can’t interpret a picture, can’t determine if a design is beautiful or ugly, can’t count your visits) and it has powers (it can detect if you write with typos, it knows if your site is well coded, it can navigate the web site just by following links, it can understand the main theme of the web site, it can detect the language you write in); This machine can be helped via SEO to better understand what your web site is about;
External SEO: Proving to search engine that a specific is important by adding links to it manually (web directories, blogs, social networks – these are easily replicated by the competition) or via natural pleasure (making the web site so beautiful that the visitors naturally want to link to it, making your web site newsworthy, creating partnerships with other web sites – these methods are harder to replicate); Links are considered “votes” by search engine; Some “votes” are less important (an obscure web directory), some “votes” are very important (a very important partner web site, related in the field of activity with yours).