What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is the process by which the text and code of a web page are tweaked in such a way that search engines like Google will give it a higher ranking in their search engine results pages (SERPs).

True SEO is not about gaming the search engines - effective, ethical SEO is about optimising the webpages in such a way that Google and other search engines will do it justice when they decide how high up they should appear in the search results.

If your website already has at least 10-20 pages of content, SEO can simply involve optimising those pages. If your website does not have any articles, effective SEO will involve producing at least 10-20 pages of quality, search-engine-optimised content.

Why is there a need for SEO?

SEO is required because search engines do not view websites the way humans do. The only thing search engines truly respect is text - specifically, high-quality text, written in such a way that the search engine can work out what it is about.

For this reason, a web page that looks great and is very useful to the human eye may not appear anywhere near as relevant and useful to a search engine. This might be because much of the information is presented in graphical or pictorial form, and search engine spiders (computer programs that "read" a website and decide its ranking) can only read text. You can quickly see this for yourself: go to a webpage, click on "View" and select "Source": that is what a search engine spider will see when it crawls that page. If the information on the webpage is not clearly viewable in the source code, the spiders won't see it and will treat it as junk, even though the webpage might be really useful to human users. So if you write a great article and upload it as a JPEG file, it might look pretty, but the search engine will not be able to read it. All it will see is a little HTML code and no useful content. In this case Google would probably not index the page at all. There are several websites out there with excellent articles uploaded as giant JPEG files, still wondering why Google won't show them in its search results.

Does my website need SEO?

If you are 100% satisfied with the amount of traffic you are getting and do not want more referrals from Google and other search engines, SEO is not for you.

Conversely, if you want to increase your website's traffic significantly and want your website to appear on the first page of the Google search results page for at least some queries, SEO is the way to do it. Put simply, if you own a website and your website does not appear on the first page of the search results for at least some queries, you have a lot to gain by applying SEO to your website.