The more you know about SEO, the more you realize how much there is to know. This is why it is difficult for someone who does search engine optimization on a daily basis to explain SEO succinctly. But I’ll give it a shot…

SEO, in simplest terms, is the ever-changing process of refining certain factors of a website, both internally (such as the code and copy) and externally (such as incoming links) with the goal of achieving higher search engine rankings for specific keywords.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part of search engine marketing (SEM) as a whole, which also includes paying for advertisements or click-throughs (when someone visits your site from another). What sets SEO apart of SEM is that, aside from the cost of making the changes in the first place, it is totally free. SEO works to get natural, unpaid or “organic” search results; the ten or so listings you see when searching on Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines. Rather than paying each time someone views or clicks on the advertisement, thousands of people can see your page in the results for their search, and visit your site without costing you a dime.

The problem is nobody has the time or patience to go beyond the first few pages of listings to find what they’re looking for. With thousands or even millions of web pages competing for the same search term, the top ten get up to 95% of the traffic, while the rest sit on the sidelines wondering why nobody comes to visit their dark little corner of cyber space. That’s where SEO comes in. A search engine optimizer’s job is to get the pages on your website ranked as highly as possible for a predetermined set of key words.

Figuring out which key words to target is another story entirely, and is covered in on the keyword research page.

In a nut-shell, that’s search engine optimization. However, the more you know about SEO, the more you realize how much more there is to know…