The Basics of SEO – Some FAQs

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a foreign field to a lot of people. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t get asked a few questions on the subject. So I’ve decided to post this FAQ article in the hopes that it will help people understand the basics, and make them a little more comfortable with the whole domain.

Q: Why are search engines important to me?

A: 85% of all website traffic is driven by search engines. The only online activity more popular than search is email. 79.2% of US users don’t go to page 2 of search results. 42% of users click on the no.1 result. For the under-40 age-group, the Internet will become the most used media in the next 2-3 years.

Q: How do search engines decide on their rankings?

A: IMPORTANT: You cannot pay a search engine in return for a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant by the search engines.

Search engines identify relevant content for their search results by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ which ‘crawl’ (analyze) your site and ‘index’ (record) its details. Complex algorithms are then employed to determine whether your site is useful and should be included in the search engine’s search results.

Q: Can’t I just pay for a high ranking?

A: No. The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google and Yahoo is finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more advertising revenue). In other words, their results must be relevant. Relevant results makes for a good search engine; irrelevant results makes for a short-lived search engine.

Most search engines these days return two types of results whenever you click Search:

Natural/Organic – The ‘real’ search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.
Paid – Pure advertising. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window.