Define SEO: What is SEO?

This ‘define SEO Basics’ post is one of a series for newbies or those wishing to improve their seo knowledge. The series should hopefully make up something like the ‘handout’ texts for an SEO class I’m planning — or at least an SEO tutorial providing SEO advice and tips as well as a clear understanding of how to carry out DIY SEO!

So what is SEO? How am I going to define SEO? Obviously it stands for Search Engine Optimization, but what does that mean exactly?

Search Engine Dictionary — a site I just found in Google because I wanted to present you with a dictionary definition — tells us that SEO is “a collective name for those activities that are directly or indirectly aimed at improving a page’s search engine ranking.”

Unlike another defintion which I saw at www.seo-dictionary.com/seo.html, Search Engine Dictionary’s definition can be said to be not only taking into account ‘On Page SEO’ — what you can do to your web page to make it rank better in the search engine results pages (SERPS) — but also Off Page SEO. I would certainly like to define SEO as including both ‘On Page SEO’ and ‘Off Page SEO’ (‘Online SEO’), which is optimizing your web page or site in a wider web context such as getting incoming links.

Should we be using SEO at all? It might seem a strange question to those who see the need for it, but there are some who think that using SEO is somehow gaining an unfair advantage. I would say that in some respects the opposite is true. Big business sites employ teams of SEO professionals to give themselves an advantage over their competition. The purpose of TrafficFolder.com is to give ordinary people SEO help so that they can in many cases successfully compete with much larger businesses to get traffic to their sites. In some ways the Internet is a great leveller. If you know how to, you — as an ordinary person without corporate money or inherited money backing you — can offer the same level of professional web site and service as a large company, and in many cases better.

So I see the Internet as an opportunity for the ordinary person to succeed in something they love doing, whether it be a hobby site or a full-scale business, in a way that may not be possible offline.

Internet SEO is a reality, whether you approve of it or not, so if you want to succeed online that you had better learn how to use it effectively. At TrafficFolder.com you will only find ‘White Hat’ SEO, that is SEO that is fair and does not break rules or harm anybody. The other thing you need to know is that DIY SEO (doing it yourself) is actually much easier than you may have been led to believe.

Please now read the next SEO post at TrafficFolder.com, which will look at Keywords as a part of what you need to do with On Page SEO as part of your DIY SEO tutorial.

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