Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, in simple words means making your website search engine friendly. Whereby search engines can list your on search engine result pages (SERPs).
SEO is the process of improving natural or organic or free rankings on search engines. Search engines rank websites based on variety of parameters and each search engine has its own algorithm to rank different websites.
Some SEO-related definitions:
Algorithms:
A search algorithm is, in short, the incredibly complex mathematical formula that a search engine uses to "rank" web sites for keywords. Based on a huge number of variables and calculations, algorithms are among the most closely-guarded secrets on the internet. Why? Imagine if they were leaked - suddenly the less-than-honest would have a very specific guideline to follow in climbing to the top of search results in a less-than-organic way, ruining the quality of Google's search results and their entire competitive advantage with it.
Bot or Bots or Crawlers or Robots or Spiders:
Googlebot for example is a search engine crawler. Googlebot periodically traverses the web in record time indexing content, links - everything contained in page source code - and storing it in Google's search index. Then, when a user visits Google and enters a search phrase, the index, filtered by the algorithm, is what the user gets.
Frames:
Frames are a way of laying out a website with multiple documents in one browser window. However from an SEO viewpoint the use of frames for your website is not recommended. Since frames do not use links in the same way, and since links may point to one frame from another, they may cause serious problems for crawlers. Instead build your website using a CSS-based layout.
HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language):
This is the building block that has made the web the greatest modern tool for business, social, informational, political and any other causes. Search engines look exclusively at a web page's HTML code to determine its relevance. Therefore, it's a good idea to pay attention to HTML and familiarize yourself with proper tagging techniques if you're hoping to get a good handle on SEO.
Meta Tags:
Meta tags are found at the top of a page's source code. They are used to specify certain things that might not be found in the page content. They also allow webmasters to put up certain "flags" that search engine crawlers can react to. There are many Meta tags available for use, and many of them can help with SEO to a great extent and for a variety of purposes. However, Meta tags are no longer used in the way they originally were - as a place to stuff keywords to drive your site up in rankings. Some webmasters out there are still doing this, but they are decidedly behind the times and unaware of the impending, or already cast-down, penalties.
Search Engines:
They are programs that scan an existing index of the web based on a query of search terms, or keywords, that a user enters.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs):
The pages resulting from a search engine query run by a user. Webmasters review these pages to determine where their pages are ranking for certain search terms.
Submission:
For SEO this has traditionally meant submitting a web site to search engines so they'll know about and crawl it. SEO firms offered submission services as a big selling point to bring in clients. However, for a long time now submitting your site to search engines hasn't done jack. They're all much smarter now - just focus on gaining quality inbound links and your site will be indexed in no time.
