Placing First
Your exposure using SEO
First and foremost, what the heck is SEO??? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the manipulation of key words within a website which allows search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) to decipher what your website has to offer. When someone conducts a search on the web, the search engine uses a very complex set of algorithms to find only the most relevant pages to that specific search. Search engines send robots, otherwise known as "spiders," to "crawl" through your pages to find the key words which are meticulously placed that relate to the search conducted in just fractions of a second. The more relevant the information found on your pages relates to the search, the higher you will place in that search. These are often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results. Effective use of SEO costs nothing, but will allow you to stand out to really rise above your competitors.
Search engines have to constantly adapt to new information to ensure that relevance is always achieved as opposed to landing on pages of no use or relation to what you were searching for. This happens when web masters get out of hand with key words, placing them in places where they don't necessarily belong or cramming to many key words in where they don't relate. There are hundreds of factors which effect where your site will appear on a search engine, but search engines typically assume that the more popular a site, page, or document, the more valuable the information it contains must be. This can be achieved simply by ensuring your information in always up to date and relevant.
"Search engines are answer machines. When a person performs an online search, the search engine scours its corpus of billions of documents and does two things: first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query; second, it ranks those results according to the popularity of the websites serving the information. It is both relevance and popularity that the process of SEO is meant to influence." More information can be found in this awesome beginners guide to SEO, http://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/guides/Moz-The-Beginners-Guide-To-SEO.pdf
