Unfortunately, due to lack of education in search engine optimization (SEO) a lot of people think that all they have to do is put get websites live online to be found by search engines and then by customers. Well, those who think so have a chance, provided they have no competitors, have good content on the website and their site is listed by a search engine. However, having no competitors in today’s world is almost impossible. If you are selling something, be sure there are a lot of other guys willing to sell the same or similar things all over the world. That is why it is important if not to be ahead of your competition but at least stay abreast. And even if you think you can afford hiring a search engine optimizer (an SEO) or a whole bunch of them you must be aware of what search engine optimization is and how it is done. This knowledge will allow you to hire a right SEO, to control his/her work avoiding bad SEO practicing (so-called black hat SEO) and even to do search engine optimization by your own in certain extent.

Let’s begin with how a search engine works. There are only three major search engines (SE’s) which are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. Of course, there are others, but those three giants hold the lion’s share of the search engine market and a lot of minor ones are just powered by one of those three and use its database. Thus I believe the other SE’s are not worth consideration. Among those three search engine giants Google is, no doubt, the most gigantic. It is said to hold 60-85% of search market according to different sources. That is why there so much buzz about optimizing websites for Google. Google’s team seems to have managed to create a search engine algorithm which allows retrieving search engine result pages (SERPs) without any biased ranking and on the basis of website’s online reputation and popularity.

Anyway, all three major search engines are crawler based SE’s. It means that they employ special software which “crawls” through millions of websites from all over the world. This software is often called “spider”, “crawler” or “robot” (Googlebot at Google). When such spider crawls through a website, passing from page to page by means of links which it is allowed to follow, it brings the website’s content and some other information to the “index” stored on servers (the whole bunch of them, I believe) of a corresponding search engine company. Information about each page crawled by a spider is processed by a highly complicated algorithm which determines how a page will be ranked in SERPs for this or that search query matching keywords which the crawler “extracts” from the page. This algorithm is a corporate secret of a search engine company and is a cherished dream of every search engine optimizer to know the formula which a SE uses to evaluate websites’ ranking. Knowing the algorithm is like finding a treasure. Can you imagine that Google is said to use up to 200 factors to determine page rank in SERPs, and people knowing only a few of them run good SEO business mostly based on its knowledge. What would be if the whole Google algorithm were revealed?

I have to divide this article into a few parts as it seems to be a long one and its length may scare a reader, furthermore, lengthy articles are not good for maintaining reader’s attention. So I will talk about the main components of search engine optimization. Keep in touch!