Search Engine Optimization, optimizing your website for it to be visible in the search results of a search engines query or in a search result of a directory.

Basically, SEO is a marketing strategy for your site. To be included in the top ten search results of an impressive search engine/directory guarantees a return of investment. Search Engine Optimization can be viewed as a new form of publicity for a website which secures definite visitors and targeted traffic for your site.

There are various Search Engines in the net today. The top rated search engine is Google. It is a prestige and good practice of SEO to be included in the top ten list search result of Google.

Google and other search engines use a crawler to search for the site most relevant to a certain category or field. Googles crawler is called a spider. It is a bot designed to crawl websites for keywords and site linkings. It has developed their Googlebot to be pretty efficient and fast.

Directory and Search Engines

Directory and Search Engines are two different entities. But to the average user, the look and feel is the same. But for a website owner interested in optimizing their website, it is important to distinguish between the two.

Whereas the search engine uses bots to crawl websites, Directories are searchable databases of websites that are categorized, reviewed and ranked by humans.

Yahoo is the most popular Directory listing on the web. Another important directory is the ODP or Open Directory Project. One emerging Search Engine is the MSN Search, you can watch out for its launching soon.

Once, website submission was a good way for your site to be visible on a search results rank of a directory. But website submissions for some directory listings may require fees and does not even guarantee a high ranking in the search results. It may take them long to approve the submission and the visibility of the site in the search ranking will still be dependent upon the keywords and site links. A good marketing practice for your site is just to optimize it. Optimizing your site may require extensive research on relevant keywords to be used in your site, optimizing the content, and A site can be optimized for search engine/directory listing through many ways. It can be with the use of keywords in the title and description fields of your Meta tag and through site linking. A search engines crawler uses these leads generated by a users query to look for the most pertinent site related to the query. So a good practice of SEO is to custom tailor your sitess content and reflect this on the keywords visible on your site. SEO is not only dependent on the keywords your site has. The freshness of the contents also counts. It is advisable from time to time to change the look and feel of your site.