What Does SEO Stand For?

So your asking "What does SEO stand for?" One would hope it would be something altruistic like Truth, Justice, and the American Way (I can say that officially as of 01-20-2009...)

*cricket* *ribbit* *cricket*

Okay, enough with the SEO and/or political "humor". But, if you're reading this because you don't know what SEO stands for, I guess you have no idea what I mean by SEO humor, do you? I'm really milking this one aren't I?..;)

Very simply, SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization". If you have any experience with online marketing, or online business of any kind, you probably know or have heard this term before. Either way, not to worry, it isn't really that hard to grasp.

Search Engine Optimization refers to the practice of optimizing meta data, formatting, linking structure, content, and other attributes, of web pages at a given site (and webpages linking to those sites) with the goal in mind of generating the highest possible rankings for the given site, for certain organic keyword search terms.

The term "optimizing" above can be substituted with "tweaked", "modified", "changed" - it just means that you are making adjustments to any and all of these factors on a particular website. I mention "webpages linking to those sites" as well. That's because, one of the most important aspects of SEO goes beyond any work done to pages at the site you want to increase rankings for (i.e. "on page" SEO.) This of course would be the practice of establishing links from other sites on the web to the site being opimized or SEO'd (i.e. "off page" SEO.)

SEO is not web design. SEO is not marketing. SEO is not PR. However, the practice of SEO may and often does incorporate all of the above factors, but it is distinct. SEO is really a holistic process with effects that are generally cumulative and long term, because of the nature of how sites are indexed. The effect of a particular action you take could arrive as quickly as a few days (if it involves getting a link from an authority site in your site's niche.) However, more often than not, the effect of your efforts will not materialize for 30 to 90 days, the time it takes for spiders to index your site and process the data found both on page and off page.

I know it probably seems a little sophomoric of me to even write a blog post about what SEO stands for - but the fact is, a lot of people either don't know, or are confused about it. And that includes some of my SEO clients too...;)