Introduction to SEO-Tutorial Part-1

This article will cover the ground level terms and basic understanding of SEO. This will be a tutorial for those who are new to SEO and a revision for the one's already in it.

What is SEO or Why do we do SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the heart of any website. A website/ blog when created cannot be visible on its own. It is the fuel which runs the website. This is the technical part of website promotion. SEOing is helpful in improving the quality of the website by the use of Search Engine ( Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista) via natural/organic/algorithmic search results. A basic requirement for a SEO will be some technical knowledge ( familiar in HTML). SEO is the basic activity of optimising the website or the pages in a way to make it search engine friendly. Earlier a site is presented to the search engine, sooner are there chances to rank higher and getting more searches will lead to more visit on your site.

There is one truth regarding SEO that eventhough we do every possible thing to promote our website, it does not guarentee you in the top rating but if you neglect the basic rules, it certainly will not go unnoticed. It is better to set a target of getting into the top 30 results of the search engine on a particular keyword than trying to be numbr one on 10 keywords.

There are different types of search

1. Image Search
2. Local Search
3. Industry or Vertical search

1. Image Search- Helps you search for Images, animations, pictures. At the moment this the fastest growing search services on the Internet. Following big names provide Image searching

- Google
- Picsearch
- Yahoo
- Alta Vista
- Live Search
- Media Mingle
- Retrieva

2. Local Search- Local search are similar to the yellow pages. These are search engine which does Geographically constrained searching. Say eg- if you are looking for Grocery shops in a particular location or a creche for your kid within 3km from your house, local search engines are the best guides. Google Maps look for physical addresses mentioned in the regular webpages.

Froogle.com and Yokel.com ( Product Search Engine) use techniques such as targeted web crawling and direct feeds to collect information about products for sale in a specific geographic location

Other local Search engine portals are:

a) Windows Live Local
b) Ask.com's Ask City
c) True Local
d) Zevents
e) Yahoo Local
f) Dias Pages


3. Industry Specific/ Vertical Search Engine- These are Search engine that provide information on specific business or a specific vertical. Eg- I am planning to buy a Mobile phone and i want to know the providers of Mobile Phone, Vertical search delivers the business what the big sites cant and without using the combination of complex keywords. Vertical Search Engine sends their spiders to a very large polished database and their indexes will contain data regarding a specific topic which are of maximun importance to the people in a particukar area.


SEO cannot be called as advertising. Though SEO is a part of Search Marketing. One can promote their website through Paid Listing (PPC). The basic idea behind SEO is to get top ranking because your site is relevant to the term/keyword searched for.

How do search engines work

Search Engine is a software program that searches the web to find documents in combination with the specified keywords entered. Broad based search engine like Google, yahoo have Web Crawlers/Web Spiders/ Web Robots which fetches large documents. Then an indexer, which is another program reads the documents searched for, and returns with a search index containing the words in the document. Each search engine creates a algorithm for index so that relevant and meaningful results are obtained for each query. Search Engines are non human, they are not intelligent to decipher everything on the web. They are mostly text driven ( We will learn more about this further in my coming blogs). Search Engine Crawls the web looking at different items( mainly text) to understand what the particular site is all about. After the search engine crawls, indexes, processes i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database, it calculates its relevance and then last activity is retrieving the result- it returns with the most releavant data seeked for and displays them in the browser.