text: Posted about 2 days ago
  
  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a practice to make your web site more visible to the audience looking for the information you have in your website. It only affects “organic search results”, paid search results such as “Google Adwords”.
  
  This is our description as 3IN Consulting, but what other “big guys” describe SEO?
  
  Wordpress: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s ‘natural’ or un-paid (organic) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.”
  
  SEOmoz: “SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a web site in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines.”
  
  I am sure you have noticed people always talk about Google when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. But why? Aren’t there any other popular search engines? Is Google really monopoly? We need to look at the chart below to understand this better.
  
  This chart shows how Google dominates today’s search engine market worldwide. According the comScore’s Web Search Market Share and Volume report, Google has 66.4% shares in US search engines and 79.6% in UK. It even has 24.6% market share in China after Baidu with 72.9%. This tells us Google as a search engine is really powerful all over the world, moreover unbeatable in some countries. However, this is not the main reason SEO experts always talk about Google, give examples on Google and even talk in Google’s jargon. It is Google’s scientific approach to the search results. Google guys always come with a general solution to a public issue or problem. This is what makes them number 1 search engine optimization resource along webmasters.
  
  Enough chit-chat! Let’s get some juice!
  
  You might be new to this market and already confused about the terms we use. First, let’s make them clear. What is “Organic Search Engine Results”, can I eat them, healthy? No! Check this out:
  
  As you can clearly see the difference in the image above, “Organic Results” means what Google thinks how much searching keywords match with your content. In this example, we search “Web Design” and see 3 different regions. SEO is only interested in the maroon part. At this point, it’s understandable that you have the same question in mind: “Is there any effect of advertising in Google to its search results?“, we will answer this question in future articles. This is a little advanced topic for beginners.
  
  Another term is “Google Page Rank“. Page Rank can be described as the importance of a web sites from search engine point of view. Google gives you a page rank starting from 1 and you will climb up stairs using techniques determined by Google. Page rank shows people how your information is accurate and valuable; in addition to telling search engines the links you have to the other websites are really important.
  
  “Canonical Url” is a normalized form of dynamic url query strings. Let’s say you sell colorful shirts and one of your product’s url is: This is really a bad practice for both user experience and search engines. Instead of that, you should use something like: or with a little better approach:
  
  You might see or read about robot.txt before, but you still don’t know what it is. Not a problem, because it simply tells search engines not to index whole website or some of your pages. “What!? Are you mocking crazy? What would I want my pages not to be found?” Hold your horses, you might not, but it is very useful in some specific cases. Think about this for a second; you have a custom CMS and you don’t want the admin panel link to be visible to public. Even though they need to know the credentials (or hack:) to connect to the admin panel, you still don’t want them to try because it is a security risk. You can’t be invisible at all, but not being in plain sight is a good precaution.
  
  Another term you often hear or read when it comes to SEO is “nofollow” tag. Yes, it really says search engines not to follow the link, so you don’t get any benefit. The philosophy behind is to improve the quality of search engine results and preventing occurrence of spam indexing. Google recommends us using nofollow tag when the link goes to:
  
  - untrusted page - paid link or an ad - a login page that Google cannot crawl such as “log in” or “sign up here”
  
  “Web Crawler” or “Crawl Engine” is an automated computer program that browses the Internet and indexes web pages in a methodical manner. When you make some changes on your website, they are sometimes shown in search engines after a while, do you know why? Because the crawler runs in order and they get updated at the scheduled time .
  
  “Backlink building” is not something you don’t know. Actually it is an SEO jargon to get a link from a website. The idea is when people like a page, they start giving out links to that. And the more backlinks a page has, the better.Why do I need to be listed in Search Engines?
  
  Because you want to be found! If not, why are you even reading this article? Go get a up of coffee and watch a TV show :) Yes, the real point is to be appreciable.
  
  Search Engines are not the only way to get traffic. People visit your site by clicking a link on a social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter. The other way is to have your website’s link on another web page, so people click that link and.. abracadabra they become your visitors, too.
  
  Even though they are not the only way, search engines are the primary method of finding the information. At least this is how it works for the majority of Internet users. They only exist to provide targeted traffic, it means they are there for you to find what you’re looking for. Search Engines are the roadways of the Internet.
  
  You already know your page needs to be found and indexed by search engines, Google has crawl engine for this job and the last piece of puzzle is ‘Google indexes all the Internet’. Yes I know it sounds pretty crazy, but it’s true! This is the first question you should ask after knowing these three pieces of information: “I don’t have to do anything, because Google does everything, right?” No! Then the second question comes: “Why can’t the search engines figure out my site without SEO?“. Crawl Engines are written to be smart, but you still need to show the path. You are still visible to public even though you don’t do any SEO, but do you really think coming after bizillion pages affect your traffic? Millions of people don’t, so they do SEO.
  
  Let me give an example how you can help search engine crawler; you have a page full of animal pictures, no text at all. How can the crawler understand what this page is about? It can’t! If you expect a piece of code opens up all the images on your page and understands what they are about, let me tell you something: “This is not Matrix!”. So you have to let them know what they are about by adding short descriptions. I don’t want to give you technical details in this article, but you need to know there are some html attributes that are identified by search engines and you can optimize your pages using them correctly.
  
  And the last but not the least question: “Can I do my own SEO?”, yes! BUT (you know what they say about “but”, forget whatever comes before it :) it is not easy task. You need to do a lot of readings and follow new trends on search engine optimization, plus you have to spend long ours in front of a computer.
  
  We will talk about technical details and debate on options we have to make our pages more “search engine friendly” in our future articles.
summary: Great article about Search Engine Optimization by 3IN IT Consulting Group