Free SEO Guide > Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

By Samuel Tan
Written on December 21, 2005.

In this article we would discuss, what is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many people tend to misunderstand the meaning of SEO because Search Engine Optimization sounds like an attempt trying to optimize a search engine. In reality, it is the other way round. SEO is actually an attempt to optimize a website in order that it would get more crawls and listing in search engines and also to gain better rankings on search results.

The history of SEO begins before 1998 when search engines uses meta tags to list websites instead of getting the content indexed. People begin populating meta tags with every keyword they can find and some even copy and paste their content into their meta tags. After 1999 Google started the crawlers and indexing of websites which calculates the keyword density to find out how important that particular website is to a particular keyword. Since then, SEO has slow down and people forget about the importance of SEO.

So why do people do SEO? In today's internet there can be millions of website competing for the same keyword and to even get a website on the first page is almost impossible even with great SEO. People still does it anyway because if the website gets indexed for more keywords, the possibility of it getting more traffic is better. Search engine covers 75% of today's internet traffic because traditionally people uses type-in domains to find what they want but now as search engines are getting better and better, their first resort is always search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN or others. From my experience, some basic SEO optimization can gain traffic to a small website over 100% in just 1 month.

Who are SEO important to? In my oppinion, SEO is important to smaller websites because smaller websites to not have enough budget to pay for category listings nor enough to get a good PPC campaign going. Search engine optimization is the only way for them to gain traffic with less budget or simply no budget because it is FREE. Most smaller websites do not survive because they simply think by creating the website alone, search engine would list them sooner or later yet they do not consider that their site may be on page 745 of the search result.

With some good SEO, a website or a page can easily get to the top 10 pages of a search result and therefore SEO should always have a certain priority in creating a website. There is no point creating a website which looks amazing but gets no visitors. Visitors = Money either from advertising or selling a product or just simply sending your message accross and should always be the main focus of a website.

This website is dedicated to teach and educate people on search engine optimization methods and other provide SEO tools for people who are interested in SEO for free without the need to register as member or returning any favor. In my future article's I would start from the basics of SEO such as doing User Analysis and preparation to start a website and basic SEO articles which are easy to understand and implement to more Complicated techniques such as Search Engine Optimizing URL Redirects and more.

Topics such as Google PageRanks and Alexa Rankings would also be discussed by us regarding their importance and reliability.

Come back and check our our SEO Guide areas for more updated articles and new tips and tricks from me. This is all for the first section of Free-SEO.com's SEO Guide: Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For those who are interested to know me more, you can go to my blog by pressing on my name at the top of the page. Please check out the available SEO tools which has already been provided and download the WebCEO software which is extremely useful if you already know some basics of SEO. The software itself include an easy to understand SEO Guide.

Soon, other tools such as Search Engine Submission, Link Exchange and Traffic Resource would also be included to help you through your SEO and other ways of increasing your website traffic.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.