Search engine optimization is really about optimising your webpages for the best keywords, right? Or is it about getting other relevant sites to link to your site? Or is it about being visible in social media? Well actually SEO covers all of the above and much more.

The web is really a huge collection of domain names, words and images in files, all linked to each other in a gigantic network. Search Engines spider this network to try and make sense of these words, and links to understand which results are most relevant.

In trying to understand the words and links, search engines may also use other off-site factors such as user behaviour. For example, Google collects a huge amount of data on which sites are most popular just by analysing what people are clicking on or searching for. (See this SEOmoz article for more info) If a site uses Google Analytics, then Google has a much deeper level of information such as how long people spend on the site, how many pages they visited, where the site visitors came from, and much more. A Pingdom survey in May showed that one third of the top 500 sites use Google Analytics and this number is definitely growing.

Search engines can also get information on how popular a site is by analysing how many times it is bookmarked or recommended on community sites such as Delicious or Digg.

So while we don’t know exactly what weight Google puts onto each of the various factors which affect our search rankings, we can apply a scientific approach to better understand why certain sites rank high for a particular search term.

If for example we know what the top 10 results are for a particular search term, we can reverse engineer the results to understand what makes them rank high.

SEO is therefore really the science of understanding what other sites are doing well in order to rank high on a search engine and then applying similar principles to your own websites.

Ideally you want to be one step ahead of your competition and continually apply new ideas to make your site more popular and therefore more visible, but assuming you don’t even rank in the top search results pages (SERPS), you have to start by putting yourself on an even playing field.

SEO can be categorised into on-site SEO and off-site SEO. The on-site optimization is about ensuring your whole website and individual webpages are search engine friendly. It is about removing any technical barriers that are likely to prevent a search engine being able to spider or index your site. It is also about including the right words in the right places on your webpages so that a search engine can understand what each page is about about and the theme of your site.

The off-site optimization is about understanding what off-page factors are causing sites to rank high for a particular search term. One element of this involves finding out how many sites link to the top ranking sites, the importance of these sites, and actually why these sites are considered important.

SEO consultants like us use various software tools, some of which we develop in-house, to analyze how your site compares against the competition. We can then apply our knowledge and make recommendations on what needs to be changed in order to give you an equal advantage to the top ranking sites.

In another blog post I will analyse the benefits of some of the tools we use.