Mystery Guest recently posted the The SEO's Guide to Beginners where she points out that a lot of what SEOs talk about makes absolutely no sense to anyone that is not an SEO. Our friends, family and clients often glaze over when we explain ourselves. Based on Mystery Guest's observations and questions, I'm taking a shot at explaining the issues she mentions in plain English so we can remove that oddly shoe-shaped thing from our collective mouths.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the craft of making your website receptive to the search engines so they will send you visitors. This is especially valuable for website owners because that traffic is targeted - the viewers you get through a search engine are genuinely interested in what your website has to say.

What is a Search Engine? 

Search engines are web-based programs that index the internet and then match user queries with relevant websites. Google is the biggest search engine. Yahoo! MSN (aka Live), and Ask are other well-known search engines.

How Does a Search Engine Work?

To determine which websites are relevant to the user query each search engine has developed its own ranking criteria, which means they each deliver slightly different results. This doesn't mean that any one search engine is "the best," just that they deliver different results.

The search engines have moved well beyond simple word matching. They now use hundreds of ranking factors, some of which are obvious and some that are pretty obscure. The search engines take all of these factors and combine them in a complex formula that gives different weight to the various factors. This formula is called an algorithm, and the websites that rate the highest for a given query are put at the top of the results.

The engineers at the different search engines are constantly trying to improve their results to better serve the user. The engineers tweak the algorithm, adding or subtracting weight to the ranking factors and even adding new factors, putting the search results in a constant state of change. A site that ranks well for a keyword phrase today may not tomorrow.

Also, thousands of new sites being are launched daily and existing sites expand their content, making thousands of websites competitive for new keyword phases, which creates even more change in the search results.

What Does an SEO Do? 

A professional SEO makes sure a website is eligible to be in the search engines' index, makes sure the website pages are in the index, and then determines which keyword phrases are most valuable for that website to gain conversions. The SEO tracks and measures success, watches out for shifts in the search engines' algorithms, and makes adjustments accordingly. The SEO also promotes the website online through various tactics so the website will gain the trust and respect needed to rank well in the search engines for the targeted terms.

Some SEOs take advantages of weaknesses in the search engines' algorithms and automate methods to gain ranks quickly. This is known as "black hat" and is a short-term business mode. Itl is often based on "web spam," where guestbooks, blogs, and forums are targeted to display links leading to the pages the spammer is trying to get ranked. This annoyance is very similar to email spam for the owner of the site, who must keep his site clean from links pointing to websites that fall outside of the webmaster guidelines. Websites that link to such sites may get penalized themselves.

A Link is More Than a Link 

The most common and powerful way to get a website to rank well is by gaining links pointing to your website. These links not only show the viewer the way to your pages, but also act as a vote on the eyes of the search engines. The more links pointing at your site, the more important it must be. A big part of an SEO's job is picking up new links for their websites.

But Not All Links are Equal 

As mentioned, the search engines use hundreds of methods to identify how valuable a website is when determining rank placement. Several of those factors revolve around the links pointing to the website. Some of the factors the search engines look at are:

• Where is the link pointing from?
• Where is the link pointing to?
• Is the referring site related to the site it is linking to?
• Just how related is it?
• Where is the link location on the page?
• How many links does the referring site have pointing at it?
• What text is highlighted in the link (what text is underlined and clickable)?
• Is the link paid for?
• And so on... 

The clickable text of a link is very important to the search engines. It acts as a headline for the page it points to and suggests what the content of the page is about. This is a big factor for determining the rank of the page being pointed to. If you have a page with 200 links pointing at it with the anchor text "click here," it won't help you nearly as much as "secret ways to wealth."

Some links are really just advertisements. These links are paid for to get visitors to the site being paid for, and sometimes links are purchased to help push a website's rank up the search engine results pages. The search engines do not like paid links. In the eyes of the search engines, purchased links are not as relevant to the content they point to as natural, freely-given links are. After all, if you pay me $X to put a link on my website, you can pretty much ask for whatever anchor text you want and I'll oblige. You can often spot paid links by looking for the word "sponsored" above them.

The Myth of Meta Tags 

The original search engines relied on meta tags to help them determine the rank of a website. Meta information is information about information. Meta tags are small lines of code that go in the head of a web page that are not seen by the viewer but are seen by programs the search engines use to index and classify your website.

The problem with meta tags is they rely on word matching, so some website owners put irrelevant keywords in their meta tags in hopes of drawing high traffic numbers even though their websites didn't have anything to do with the terms listed. The search engines have since moved past word matching and have depreciated meta tags for ranking purposes. This doesn't mean meta tags don't have an influence on SEO, just that they are not the answer to your website ranking issues.

The Myth of PageRank

Search engines have a system of determining the raw link strength of a page. This system calculates the number of sites linking to a particular web page and their raw strength and assigns a number. While all search engines use a system like this, the most famous is Google's PageRank, which is named after one of Google's founders, Larry Page.

Google looks at the links pointing at a page and assigns a PR score to that page of 0-10. A score of "0" means the page has very few links pointing at it. A score of "10" means the number and strength of links pointing to the page is a lot. Only a handful of websites have a PR10.

PageRank does not mean value or rank. It is really just a shortcut to determining raw link strength and is just one of the hundreds of search ranking factors. Most websites have a PR score of 4 or less.

SEO is Fluid

Yesterday's tactics and truths probably don't hold up today. SEO has gone through several myths and changes over the years, including meta tags, PageRank, keyword stuffing, keyword density, reciprocal linking, and more. The days of huge overnight changes in the search engines seem to be passing with smaller, less obvious adjustments coming in over the course of several weeks instead.

Of course, that could change again tomorrow. 

Useful Resources 

Several of the common terms used by SEOs are explained on my SEO Primer.

Dan Theis has just relaunched his SEO Fast Start Guide for 2007. And SEOmoz has a great Beginner's Guide to SEO.

SEO Refugee is a great place to keep up with industry trends and get a helping hand when needed.