What's so secretive about search engines?

"SEO"

"Keywords"

"SERP"

"Page Rank"

"Back Links"

What do all these terms mean? Well, that depends on when you first realized your website needs search engine traffic in order to attract visitors to grow your business. The terms above are common knowledge to most webmasters who have at least visited a few top search engine marketing portals, SEO forums, or read at least one e-book on SEO. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, don't despair. We understand the confusion about the search engine optimization process, and we are here to guide you with an easy to follow road map.

Search engines are still very much misunderstood by most webmasters because the search engines don't publish the exact methods they use to rank websites.

If you are serious about your website's visibility, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about the most effective and safe methods to get top ranking on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. What you have to realize is search engines actually need your website for their survival and profitability.

The commercial aspect of the Internet has created an entirely different set of problems for the search engines. Search engines existed long before Google came along in libraries,research institutions, and government facilities. In those early days, the document retrieval process consisted of mainly looking at the content of the documents without any external influences and links. The Internet explosion has single-handedly created the race to invent the "smartest" search engine that is able to find the "diamonds in the rough. The diamonds being the truly valuable web content that is relevant to user queries, and the rough being the junky low quality deceptive web pages that try to mislead the search engines. Organizing the billions of web pages and its content into meaningful, relevant well sorted search results is an immense task even for Google.

Think of search engines as the editorial watch dog of all content on the web. As chief editors, it's the search engines job to retrieve the most suitable web pages in response to a user query. The search engines make money by displaying ads next to the natural search results returned. This is why their search relevancy is the key to their survival. The more relevant the search results are, the more people will make them their favorite search tools. Since about 2001, Google has been doing a fantastic job at returning the most relevant results and has been rewarded with hoards of advertisers bidding on keywords making them a pile of money year after year. In order to keep their search results relevant, the search engines have to ensure there is a level playing field among websites. They do this by frequently tweaking their algorithms to find bad apples that don't play by the rules.

This short tutorial will try to take you through the necessary steps to build a site the search engines will love and reward you with high ranking(s). And finally, this tutorial would not be complete if we also didn't warn you about the inherent risks of trying to trick or game the search engines with different spamming techniques to get ahead of the pack.