A number of articles and white papers have been written on this topic. Before the days of Google and Web 2.0 there was little attention paid to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO refers to “optimizing” web sites to rank very high in the results of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. SEO helps structure your website content so it is easily found and indexed by search engines. In the early days of the Internet Era you could get your site listed on Yahoo or Altavista by merely submitting it. As long as it wasn’t too complicated for search engines to understand your site, you could get it listed within 2 to 3 days. But Yahoo and Altavista couldn’t keep up with the flood of URL submissions. As web evolved, companies began to embrace the online medium and the potential for using it as a marketing tool.

In the late 1990’s something dramatic happened. Google introduced PageRank, a system of ranking Web pages based on their importance and other factors. Google search spiders crawl through the web following links, indexing and categorizing pages based on their content and relevancy. When the search spiders crawls and finds backlinks to your site along the way, each backlink translates to a positive confidence of vote to your site. It indicates popularity or importance of your website to the search engine which ultimately helps place you in the top of the search results. But this is one of the many factors that Google or other search spiders take into account while ranking sites. In order to allow spiders to understand the site content, web masters needed to follow certain rules like using proper keywords, title tags and content in each web page. At this point search became more of an art than a science. People can no longer expect their sites to appear in the top of the search engine results by simply adding their sites to major directories.

Why is SEO important to you?
The Search Engine market is fragmented, with Google commanding the majority of the market share (over 80%). If there is one search engine that you want to focus on, that would be Google. Microsoft’s announced bid for Yahoo on Feb 1st, 2008 might increase Microsoft’s share in the search market, but it still won’t be able to challenge Google’s dominance in the Internet Search market (at least not in the near future).

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