METAPILOT Search Engine Optimization & Social Media Marketing

What is Search Engine Optimization & How Does it Work?

METAPILOT is an SEO & social media marketing firm in Miami, Fl and Chicago, ILand we hear this question quite often.

The thing is, if everyone relied solely on their own resources to keep up with and organize every, single, solitary new piece of information on the web, SEO wouldn't just be unnecessary-it would be impossible. If that was the case, each of us would have to be our own search engine and each of us would have different methods of retrieving, sorting and storing information. Since no site could possibly hope to appeal to millions of unique search engines, being found on the web, in that scenario, might simply be a matter of luck-regardless of how a site's information was organized.

Fortunately, search on the Web has evolved to be more centralized than that. Sites like Google, Yahoo and others take care of finding, sorting, and ordering the billions of pages of Web information for us. Most of us have a good idea of how tell the engines what we're looking for and how to understand and use the information they respond back to us with.

With these relatively few search engines, the methods of categorizing, and presenting information (i.e. the algorithms) that must be analyzed and kept track of are manageable. What's more, with most people using the same search engines over and over again, patterns in the way people search for information have been quite thoroughly documented over the years. It's these two factors that are the foundation of accurately being able to change and predict a site's "searchability characteristics".

Put differently, search engine optimization takes what is known about people's search habits, combines it with what is known of the search engine's algorithms, and creates websites that rank highly for popular searches within a target market.