What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

Advice For Newbies

New to SEO? An excellent starting place is Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” This is a free PDF download that covers basic tips that Google provides to its own employees on how to get listed. You’ll find it here.

Another free guide worth checking out is SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO,” which you’ll find here.

There are also a variety of print books you might consider. Here’s our review of some newer books: A Roundup Of Best SEO Books.

Advice At Search Engine Land

Here at Search Engine Land, we provide SEO advice and news in a variety of ways:

How To: SEO is our section that is devoted to practical tips and tactics about search engine optimization.

100% Organic Column is Search Engine Land’s column that covers different search engine optimization topics every week.

More Search Engine Land Columns – Beyond our 100% Organic column, Search Engine Land also has these columns that cover SEO topics:

In House
In The Trenches
Industrial Strength
Let’s Get Social
Link Week
Locals Only
Small Is Beautiful
Strictly Business
Video Search

SEO Library Archives is an area of Search Engine Land that provides a collection of all stories we’ve written on the topic of SEO. We also have subcategories, including:

SEO: Blocking Spiders
SEO: Blogs & Feeds
SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages
SEO: Domain Names & URLs
SEO: Duplicate Content
SEO: Flash
SEO: General
SEO: Image Search
SEO: Local
SEO: Mobile Search
SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites
SEO: Spamming
SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps
SEO: Tagging
SEO: Titles & Descriptions
SEO: Video Search
SEO: Writing & Body Copy

Also see our related Link Building category and these subareas:

Link Building: Link Bombs
Link Building: Linkbait
Link Building: Paid Links

Here are a few of our popular articles about SEO from the Search Engine Land library:

Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates
29 Worst Practices & Most Common Failures: SEO Checklist, Part 1
SEO Checklist Part 2: Best Practices
36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To
36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To
21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques

In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for each of the major search engines:

Google SEO
Microsoft’s Bing SEO
Yahoo SEO