If you have ever spoken to anyone who has a website, you hear the term “Is your site SEO’d” or “How are you doing your SEO for your site? But what is SEO?

SEO is Search Engine Optimization – or in other words — SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

So my question was when I started my online marketing career, I asked what was a “search engine” Let me tell you in simple terms – a search engine is someone like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. – there are a ton of search engines in the internet world.

To make things real simple, you go online to search for a topic or would like some information about a product or service, you type in your keywords and a “search engine, Google for example, list the results for you. To a company marketing their products, the 1st page of the search engine is gold. Most people looking for something rarely go past the 1st page.

So, enter the world of SEO. How do you as a marketer get your site to the front page of the search engines when there is a ton of competition for your product or service? This is called your SEO ranking.

The first basic truth you need to learn about SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren’t. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about.

Since the search engines value text as king, you must have the correct keywords on your site in order for your site to rise in the rankings. Here is a quick list on how to begin your SEO tactics –
1. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for
2. Keyword density
3. Keywords in special places
4. Keywords in URLS and file names
5. Keywords in page titles
6. Keywords in headings

Learning how to SEO your site does require work. SEO Networker has a whole host of trainings how to show you how SEO techniques.