Tough question, “What is SEO?”. As with pretty much all internet-connected terms, ideas and notions, that of “SEO” does not have a unique definition and it’s a blurry concept in most people’s mind.

Still, what is SEO? Since there is no ultimate, totally comprehensible definition for “SEO”, the sole means to travel is to take a look at several definitions and strive to merge them in order to own the proper perspective.

Wikipedia : “Search engine optimization (SEO) may be a set of methodologies aimed toward improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term additionally refers to an business of consultants that perform optimization projects on behalf of consumer sites.”

Fakezilla : “The changes that are made to the content and code of a net website so as to increase its rankings in the results pages of search engines and directories. These changes could involve rewriting body copy, altering Title or Meta tags, removal of Frames or Flash content, and therefore the seeking of incoming links.”

The Net Search Workshop : “The term used to explain the marketing technique of preparing a website to reinforce its probabilities of being ranked in the prime results of a groundwork engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a web site, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.”

6am Media : “The process of improving web pages so that it ranks higher in search engine for targeted keywords with the final goal of generating more revenue from the internet web site. There are many SEO techniques. In general, these techniques will be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Website Optimization. There are also two colleges of SEO: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEOs are people who play by the rule (really pointers provided by search engines). Black hat SEOs are those who push the limit of SEOs and employ some questionable or prohibited techniques (according to the rules). These black hat SEO techniques are also commonly known as spam.”

Website NOVA : “acronym for search engine optimization. This is the method of creating a web site ‘search-engine-friendly. Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO will increase the potential of your web site and usher in more traffic.”

Thousands additional definitions are on the market, virtually as many “SEO guru’s” you will realize online (“The Guru Problem” is truly the title of another article to be printed soon).
As you’ll be able to see, no definition is like another, but they all tend to converge to a bound common understanding.

There are various techniques and tools used to achieve SEO goals, and they ought to NOT be included within a definition.

Since it’s not correct to outline an idea through its tools, here may be a definition I even have come back up with when long deliberations. The suggestion is to define SEO as follows:

SEO = abbreviation for “Search Engine Optimization”, the method of optimizing and tuning a internet site and gaining online awareness for it, in order to deliver targeted visitors and ensure high conversion rates.

When done properly, SEO activities should:
- build search engines crawl the positioning;
- build search engines index the positioning;
- guarantee a high ranking among SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for given keywords;
- achieve a high page rank;
- drive targeted traffic;
- achieve high conversion rates among the positioning’s visitors.

Since nothing is definitive and final in the planet of SEO, I’d like to receive your feedback and comments: TeaWithEdge.com is a method to contact me and speak up concerning your Marketing issues.