SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a complex process to boost the position of a website in the rankings of the major search engines for a specified keyword.

The most important and first step to understand SEO is that Search Engines are machines text/html driven. Many times the most beautiful website with the nicest animations will not rank at all since the content is unreadable to the computer. Search engines use crawlers/spiders (googlebot, yahoo slurp, msnbot etc.). These spiders are complex software that reads the coding of your website and based on their individual algorithms understand the subject of the page and the relevance of its content based on previously crawled and ranked websites.

There are two ways to invite a spider to visit your website:

Submitting your url directly to the search engines is an old technique which we personally believe is worthless (just our opinion!). Submitting a page directly to the search engine, we consider, is telling the spider that your website is not popular and/or interesting enough to have other indexed sites talking and/or linking to you. This takes us to the second method of invitation and our recommended strategy.

Every time a crawler visits yours or any other website indexed in their search engine it will follow every (allowed) code in it including the links others have directed to you or vice versa. This, we believe, is the most effective and fastest way to have all the spiders coming your way and taking into consideration your website.

Once your website has been crawled it has to be indexed. Indexing a website is the process of storing your website information into the search engines mega servers and databases and assigning it to several keywords / search strings. Depending on the structure, content, keyword relevance, keyword density, incoming links, outgoing links, relevance of the incoming links, keywords in the domain, meta tags, domain’s age and many many many other factors the search engine will rank a website in their search results.

There are two main SEO optimization phases on site optimization and off site optimization. You can learn more about them by clicking on the term.

SEO is not an “exact science”; the search engines algorithms constantly change and every day there are new sources of information and coding techniques invented that might change the entire search engine optimization as we currently know it.

Optimizing and ranking your website is a long term, time consuming job and to keep up to date your website optimization and rankings need a constant research of the latest trends and search engine algorithm updates.

Nobody, not even Google’s, Yahoo’s or MSN’s employees can guarantee a specific position in any search engine. There are different opinions and “schools” of SEO, and we at SEOSapien.com respect all of them. Our search engine optimization strategy covers all the known effective SEO techniques from the late 90’s to the latest trends to maximize the effectiveness and long term ranking of every site, from the most competitive niche such as health, gaming and adult to the less competitive but much needed small local enterprises.