SEO – What is it? You see those letters in the newspaper and magazine articles that you read. You hear it on television and radio. But what does it mean?
The letters stand for Search Engine Optimization, and nobody seems to know exactly who coined that term. But optimizing a web site or blog so that it can be found in the search engines is the ultimate goal of every site owner – whether the site is used for business or personal reasons. If the site can’t be found by the search engines, it doesn’t really exist.
So what is a search engine? It is a program that searches through the pages of a web site looking for specific keywords entered by the person doing the search, and it returns a list of the pages of sites containing those keywords. While a search engine is actually a general class of programs, it is most often used to specifically describe systems such as Google, Ask, Bing, and other systems you may use when searching for information on the internet.
As competition for attention on the internet becomes more and more intense, the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) increases. The number of people using the World Wide Web is increasing, so it stands to reason that the number of web sites will increase, as will the number of searches per person per day.
The web site Internet World Stats estimates that as of March 32, 2011 there were 2,095,006,005 people using the internet world-wide. That number is up from the December 31, 2000 total of 360,985,492. That’s a growth of 480.4 percent in a little over eleven years!
There are a lot of people in the world, and a they are doing a tremendous number of searches every day. Making sure your site is well-optimized for those searches is crucial to your business or project. Otherwise, you might as well not spend the money to purchase a URL or pay for hosting services. Unless your potential customers and clients – your target market – can find your web site or blog – they will never know you are out there, and your message will not be heard.