SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the technical ways of saying, "get good search engine results." SEO is a science the every web geek tries to master. It is the reason that many of us use well designed web tools. SEO drives people to our web sites, which may be an online brochure, application, or some other web presentation. Optimization makes the text on pages stand out to engines so a site surfaces to the top.

There are two key concepts to web site SEO as far as search engines are concerned: popularity and relevance. Imagine your just wrote a book. It becomes very popular and well cited and becomes a best selling novel. Distributors make the most money by selling books people want to read. So, they advertise those books at the top of their lists and in the front shelves. Your web site is the same. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. want sites that are citedon other sites and they want the site's content to be relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

Relevance: write great quality content for your users. Figure out what key words you want to use in each page and write about that topic. Don't have less than 4 solid paragraphs with at least 2 descriptive sentences each. Engines crave content. They don't care about design (your users do but we'll talk about that later) and will likely discard most images, flash, and other fancy stuff. They want words to chew on. A few well written pages is much better than many with a couple of sentences each. Some site designers will get pages out there just so engines can see them with the intent to flesh out the pages later. That is OK as long as the "later" doesn't take too long. Poor pages can penalize a good site. We'll get into search engine timing later too.

Popularity: get others to link to you. If Ghandi recommends a book many people read it. If President Hinckley recommends a book many people read it. If the Pope recommends a book many people read it. Search engines are built to judge how many people are recommending other web sites and they know how popular the site doing the recommending is. The key is to get as many high ranked and relevant web sites to link to you as possible.