I have been asked hundreds of times as to what exactly is SEO and I have answered a million times that it is the art of placing one’s website near the top of search engine result pages for a specific group of keywords related to their business.

That is the text book definition of search engine optimization, but what exactly is it? Some believe it is playing around with code, others wonder if it is tricking search engines while there are still other people who believe that it is magic and ask for overnight rankings for their “soon to be launched” websites.

Well SEO isn’t tricking any search engines… neither is it magic. It is a process, that if done correctly can help leverage the intrinsic value of your website and maximize its chances of ranking high up on the search engines.

Now, what do I mean by the intrinsic value of a website?

Imagine your site has 100 pages of unique content. On-page SEO or website optimization helps leverage these 1000 pages of content so that they’re indexed well and search engines see the right titles and metas and internal link structure and do not encounter any difficulty in spidering these pages. Off-page optimization will help increase the popularity of this site by informing other sites of its presence and having related websites link to this useful content.

As you will notice the above example assumes that the site already has a 100 pages of unique content. Now, assume that we have another site with just 1 page of content and a form. Can SEO help you rank this site at the top of the same set of competitive keywords that we targeted in the first example?

No IT CANNOT.

Conclusion – SEO is NOT magic. It is simply leveraging the intrinsic value of the website to help it rank the best it can on search engines for a specific set of keywords.