SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically anything you do to your website (other than paying a search engine for listings or ads) to help search engines find it and help your site rank higher.

SEO includes hundreds of actions and operations. SEO usually starts with managing, optimizing, creating, and recreating content for your website that a search engine can easily find and index. This type of content can include video, audio, visual, and written ("text") content. If content is not written to be SEO-friendly, it most likely won't attract as much traffic as it could otherwise. Likewise, visual, audio, and video files (though often ignored by search engines) can be created in a certain way and on certain subjects that are considered most helpful to the general public, which will help your site rank well.

A large aspect of SEO is concerned with the programming, site organization, and HTML coding of your website. If your website's coding is not authored according to the most updated standards, search engines may have a difficult time following internal links and understanding the content. This can result in broken links, poor rankings, and (occasionally) even getting penalized. If coding is too out of date, it takes longer for a search engine to follow the proper paths and sometimes the search engine will give up before it has indexed the entire site. For this reason, the programmer or HTML coder working on your website should be very knowledgeable regarding SEO. In order to rank well, you want streamlined coding that is easy for search engines to index.

SEO also includes creating some links and "getting connected" on the World Wide Web. If your site connects to others and doesn't appear an isolated orphan, it looks more important (and popular) according to search engines. SEO also helps create more traffic to websites, which in turn shows the search engine that this is a good site where people spend time so the search engine then ranks you higher next time it indexes.