What is SEO?
SEO (or white hat SEO) is the process of optimizing the content on your website so that it is easily accessible to the site visitors as well as search engines. It also involves removing the impediments in the way of successful indexing of the whole site and Creating unique page titles, descriptions for each page as well as tagging the images with unique alt tags.
Besides this it involves creating useful, reputable content. If in addition your content is unique and stands out from other competing websites it will be even better. Getting authoritative inbound links is also another important aspect of SEO.
The Bing webmaster blog has this to say on SEO
"SEO efforts ultimately only optimize the rank position that your site's design, linking, and content deserves. It removes the technical obstacles that can impede it from getting the best rank it should.
The most important part of SEO is doing the hard work of building value necessary to make your site stand out from the competing crowd of other websites for searchers.One other thing to remember: there is a long tail in search."
Why is SEO important?
The only other way to stand out in the search engines is advertising in the search results. This costs a lot of money. For example see the figure below.
Here if you advertise on the words "Cheap Flights to Europe", every time someone clicks on that term and visits your site you will have to pay Rs114.91. So just imagine: the cost for just 100 visits will be Rs11,491.
Compared to that a middle level SEO will just cost you less than 1% per visitor in the long term of what you would have had to pay for advertising.
What is title and description tag?
The title is the heading that you see at the top of each search result. The description below it s referred to as a snippet. It is usually taken from the description tag or is excerpted from the content of the page. If you view the HTML source of any web page you will see that the title tag resides within the <title> and <title> tags of the page. An illustration is shown below.
What about Site structure? How do I Optimize it?
An Optimized site structure is one in which the main content of the page appears as higher as possible. For this purpose you have to view your website in a text based browser such as Lynx. Your main content should at least start in the first page of Lynx. A nice article regarding website structure is given in Principles of Good Web Design Besides this your website should be as compliant as possible to W3C standards.
