Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that daunts those who are not familiar with it and haunts those who are. Many have tried to define search engine optimization, unfortunately most of these definitions comes from experts who are not able to abstain themselves from using terms like “organic”, “algorithm” or “SERP”. For someone who’s trying to get familiar with search engine optimization, the term “organic” is a little too much. As a result most people would just drop the idea of learning about SEOand simply hire some seo professional to do the job (and that’s exactly what the “experts” want you to do).

Not that you must go through this holy task of “optimizing for search engines” yourself, but there’s no harm in understanding the job better, so that you know what you are paying for when engaging some lad to do it. Now, those who are already on familiar terms with SEO can skip the next two paragraphs because I m going to take a very layman-ish approach while explaining SEO. Here you go …

You know search engines? No … never mind … What about Google? (Please contact us if you don’t know Google, We’d love to get in touch with an alien)

Anyhow, Google is a search engine and internet users make use of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, etc) to find what they are looking for at internet. For example, If someone is interested in FIFA World cup news, he will type in “FIFA World Cup” and the search engine will come up with hundreds and thousands of websites, which are related to “FIFA World Cup” (in less than a second) … you can choose any of them, browse and in case you are not satisfied, go back and search again.

Now put yourself in a vendor’s shoes who’s looking to sell “Egyptian cotton towels” online, and then suppose that lots of people are actually interested in buying “Egyptian cotton towel” online.

What the business can do is to launch an online store/website and wait for the search engines to put it on top of the results when some user types “Egyptian cotton towels” in the search box and click “search”. Remember, there will be so many businesses with their own websites looking to sell pretty much the same product. Search engines are undoubtedly the most effective source to attract visitors, and most online users don’t bother to check all search results.

That means, if your website cannot make it to the first 10 or 15 results of the search engine, you are nothing but cleaned out. You’d ask. What can I do to avoid this disaster? The answer is, Optimize your website for search engines.

Therefore, SEO is everything (or anything) you do to optimize your website in a way that it will end up on top of the results when someone search for Egyptian cotton towels (or any other keywords for that matter).