SEO - Search Engine Optimisation.

According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) is defined as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. If you interested, you can follow this link to read Wikipedia's full definition of SEO.

Basically it is all about improving your website so that it appears near the top of the search results for your chosen keywords.

In recent years it has become very big business and a lot of people have made a lot of money either by optimising their own sites or through the work they have done in optimising other peoples websites.

Like a lot of profitable industries, the SEO market place has seen (and continues to see) it's fair share of people jumping on the bandwagon and all claiming to be SEO experts.

There are lots of people claiming it's highly technical or highly secretive. You'll probably hear people claim that they have cracked the Google Algorithm. I doubt it!

For me it's quite clear that for the search engines to survive they need to serve up highly relevant sites that match the searches their customers are doing. That way, their customers will stay with them. It's the model that Google uses. They focus completely on giving users of its search engine highly relevant and high quality websites. Yahoo has been quick to follow Google's lead.

So a lot of SEO techniques are based around the idea of making sure the search engines can see that your site is relevant for your chosen keywords and is high quality.

If you are interested in trying SEO techniques on your own website then I invite you to listen to my free SEO Training audio course or you might like to read my web page that answers the question How do you web optimise?

Even if you are planning to hire an SEO professional to do your website optimisation for you, I would still recommend listening to my course or reading the page on optimising because then you will have a better understanding of what they will do for you.

Related reading:

Six SEO Top Tips - Great tips to kick start your SEO.
SEO Errors - Some of the common SEO mistakes you should avoid.