I’ve found myself asked this a few times of late by divergent questioners, from a small business marketer to a marketing executive at one of the world’s largest global companies.

It occurs to me that SEO appears to many to be people a dark, murky, misty part of the online marketing world – something like that swampy area outside of Mordor in Lord Of The Rings which the protagonists had to slog through to get to their destination. People know it’s important they move in this territory but they don’t know what’s there, and aren’t sure they want to find out.

OK, so what is SEO? The definition is simple, actually. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of improving the performance of web properties by crafting webpages (and their links) to “optimize” the chance that these pages will appear in the first few pages of a search engine’s results page (SERP) for a given keyword search.

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now for the inevitable wrinkles:

1. Back in the mid-90s when they really began to come into their own with the public, search engines used to only rank web pages for a given search based on eacg page’s content relevance to keywords users entered. Then SEO tacticians got good at fooling search engines into ranking their pages highly using what are called “Black Hat”- or illegitimate – tactics such as spamming. So in 1998, Google and their competitive ilk came up with a new way to rank pages that measured popularity in addition to relevance. Google calls their version of this methodology – one of the first of its kind and by far the most commercially successful – PageRank.
2. Lately (last 2-3 years) the focus in SEO has shifted from improving search engines’ popularity and relevance rankings for a given page by using link, title, meta, and keyword-rich content, to doing this PLUS adding Web 2.0 and Social Media platforms such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to improve popularity rankings and thus increase SERP rankings. These new tools and approaches work because popularity is (simply expressed) a function of how many visitors your site gets, how many sites linking to your site (and the popularity score of those sites, too), and in terms of relevance, how often your content is regularly refreshed (e.g., via blog posts or Twitter feeds).
3. Because 1 and 2 are not universally known, people hear bad things about SEO and believe them, which only increases the fear and loathing of SEO and fails to increase anyone’s knowledge or understanding. People hear bad things because there are still a lot of Black Hat practitioners out there, and SEO is also good fodder for pot-stirring online marketing bloggers who write provocative headlines like “All SEO practitioners are worthless” or “The only SEO you need is from developers” to get traffic and readers. Sad to say, such posts are generally successful at driving traffic because so many marketers are interested in SEO and so many of those are new to it and are highly impressionable.
4. Ethical SEO involves giving clients sound advice, such as the best way to display text and label pictures and tags. Ethical practioners also encourage clients to develop and maintain good web content (and show them how) and use back-linking techniques to increase the number of incoming links to a page, which in turn boost’s that page’s popularity score. Ethical SEOs also warn clients off from practices that might be seen by search engines as spamming. Ethical SEOs and search engines consider themselves partners who, by exchanging information and tips, together improve search quality. However, unethical SEOs and search engines are continually in a state of battle. Every time one side seems to have the upper hand, the other side comes up with a new way to regain an advantage. And although their relationship is adversarial, some believe they are an essential part of the web food chain, because they drive innovation and search R&D.