These days, anyone who spends half of their waking hours online must have already heard about SEO. Many businesses have started implementing this in their marketing strategies. Some have even set up an entire team or department to handle their company’s SEO and calls the group Digital Marketing team or New Media Marketing team.

What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a system of applied strategies and techniques that cause some web pages to appear more relevant than competing pages for a given set of search terms. It is the process of improving and managing the presence of a web site in the web. In other words, SEO is ensuring that your site appear high on the yield of results when certain keywords are entered into the search engines like MSN, Google and Yahoo. Getting the top slots is never a matter of luck. With SEO, the pages that appear at the top of the search yield would look like it was done through the natural or organic ways and not through paid advertising. In essence, the main task of SEO is establishing your web site’s integrity, its content, pages and features included.

SEO may just be one part of a whole slew of online marketing strategy but to this day, SEO is considered its core.

How does it work?

There are three segments to the whole cycle of SEO: collect, classify and rate. Search engines collect web pages through "spiders", bots or crawlers that, well, crawl the web. If the crawlers found your site, the second segment happens where the search engine will make an effort to determine what your site is about. The keywords in your site would be the basis of search engine in determining under which topics to file your site. Hence, it may be said that keywords are the most significant factor in determining rankings. Then, comes the third segment, Rate. Search engines look at all of the web pages collected for a specific topic and then rank or rate the web sites based on a predetermined level of importance. The result would be having the most important web pages matched up with their keyword topic and then listed at the top of search results each time the keywords are entered into a search. Many factors are considered by search engines when a page is rated. The number one factor would be your links. Search engines check stuffs like how many web sites link to you, how fast you are in acquiring links and so on.

Before we move further with discussing how to improve your rating, let’s first discuss the initial segment in SEO, getting your web site or page "crawable". If the search engine bots cannot follow a link, then the destination page will not be included in the search results. This commonly happens when the navigation links are embedded in Flash, java script or ajax. Google, to this date, are still trying to find a way to work around this issue. Another cause for a web page to be uncrawable is if the site navigation link is embedded within forms where a user has to select an item from a drop down menu. The same thing happens when a form is needed to be filled by the user in order to see a content. Lastly, the lack of credible links into the website can cause your site to be uncrawable. Links influence ranking because the link from one site to another convey important information about the link destination.

So, if you are developing a website, it is important to ensure that your web developers are planning not just the site’s functionalities, user interface and the web site maintenance. Much consideration should be given to the management of search engine rankings. Perhaps, the safest way is to hire an SEO professional who has developed expertise in this field and can definitely do this for you.