What is SEO and how important is SEO today?

This is a 2 in 1 question and i will try to explain and break it down, so that even the lay man and anyone that does not know about information technology can understand what i am talking about.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is some how a new term  to many especially in the web industry, but it has been in existence and has been quiet for a while. Many people have overlooked it as they don't know what it means and how it can help them. If you are a website owner or planning to own a website one day then this is important to you. SEO is important to even business owners as every business owner would like to reach out to as many audience as they can. Before i keep you wondering, i will go now to explain what is Search Engine and Search Engine Optimization.

A search engine as the name implies is basically a system that enables you to search different things and interests on the internet. It can be called a big directory where almost every thing is found on the internet. Examples of search engines are; Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo etc. These 3 mentioned search engines are currently the biggest search engines on the internet where millions of people search what they are looking for. People use search engines for different purposes, some use it to search for answers, fun, study materials, daily needs and more. In fact every one that uses the internet today depend on search engines.

Now what is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Search engine optimization is a method or technology that enhances the way information are found on search engines and the internet as a whole. Almost every information found on the net today are connected to websites. So that means websites are carriers of these information. And this goes to say that search engine optimization is important or useful to websites.

How important is SEO today? I earlier stated that SEO enhances the way information are found on search engines and the internet, so that means SEO is an important aspect of web development and management, because if your website cannot be found by people, then its obviously of no use. There are other methods by which websites can be found, examples are; telling your friends about it on social medias and paying for internet advertising. These are perfectly good solutions, but SEO is a long term solution where by you do not have to pay for adverts or to display your adverts on the first or second page of search engines. So you can say that SEO saves money. If the visibility of your website is enhanced on search engines, that can also increase the popularity of your website or business and this means more prospects for you. There are other terms used in SEO such as; page rank, keywords which i will explain later.

When you search for something on Google, most times it comes up with information on the page like this;

You find highlighted information as in the picture above, those highlighted information are adverts while the ones below are called organic search information. The organic search information are the results of SEO. The words or phrase you type into the search box are called keywords. These keywords trigger search results to come up. So you can see that the owner of the highlighted info above is paying, while the owners of the information below are not paying. This is because the websites displaying the organic search information have been optimized for the keywords typed into the search engine.

At the end of the day you can say that those who get their websites optimized are smarter and wiser. In the mean time, feel free to contribute and ask questions as there are more related topics on the way.