SEO for Beginners - Part 1 - The Search

When I told my friends that I'm working in an SEO company, the first question that my friends shot at me is "SEO?!! What's that?". This question is the reason why I'm making this post. I will post the basics of SEO in parts.So, here's the first part.

Well! I kept on repeating the word SEO in the first paragraph. What does it stand for? SEO - Search Engine Optimization. As simple as that. But when you dig it deep, you will find it to be an ever expanding and ever evolving universe.

First let's concentrate on the first two words of the expansion - Search Engine. What is a search engine? You may think me foolish of asking such a question. So, everyone knows what a search engine is. Now let's look at the following search result.

These pages those come up when you search for a particular query are known as SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). In this particular page you can clearly see that the first two results are paid results and it has little or nothing to do in SEO point of view. The ones at the right, as marked, are paid advertisements. Again these too don't have any significance in SEO point of view. The main thing to be noted are the search results that are annotated with a purple box. This is known as organic search and optimizing your web pages to gain good position in these SERPs is SEO.

Hope you are now clear with the concept of search and search engines. Now, I ask you another question. How do search engines arrange these results? What's the process behind that? I'll tell you that in my next post. Stay tuned......

P.S: I've just started my career in SEO. If you have any doubts or change in opinion about what I've said above, please post them as comments. I'll get back to you as early as possible. Thank You.