The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art and science of moving a website into the top rankings on Google, or other search engines like Bing or Yahoo. If your company has a website, and you don't use SEO, you could be losing money. Lots of money. Here's why:
When someone searches for something on Google, more than 33%of the time, they're going to click on the top result - that's one third or more of all traffic searching for that search term! The second ranked website gets 17.5% of clicks, and the third result 11.4%. By the time someone gets to the bottom of the first page, they'll only click through around 2% of the time. How many people will even go to the second page of results? Not many.
Every time someone clicks through to a website, it means potential business for that site which could translate into $$$$. So you can see why the top three websites that rank for a search term are much more likely to be successful than the website down the page, or on the following pages.
How did those websites end up in the top three? Are they better than the other websites/companies? Not necessarily, but they are better optimized than their competition. Okay, let's back up a minute...how does Google determine which pages rank first? I'm glad you asked!
When you type a query into Google, for example chinese restaurant or digital photography, Google's job as a search engine is to make sure you get the best, most relevant result for that search - that's how they make their money. Naturally, being Google, they use many very complicated, and constantly changing, algorithms to acheive that goal.
Here's a simplified version of how it works: In the beginning of the Internet (just a little over twenty years ago), there
was one website. That was all. Then another website was created, then another. These websites began "linking" together until a massive web of interlinking sites was created. This is called the World Wide Web.
Google uses a program called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot or spider) to "crawl" this massive web of sites. Crawling is the process by which Google discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google Index - an enormous database of 
billions of webpages.
Google uses huge banks of computers to fetch (or crawl) websites. Using an algorithmic process, computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page.
When a user enters a query, Google's computers use special programs to search the index for matching pages and return the results it believes are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors (courtesy of those complicated algorithms), one of the more important of which is Google's PageRank for a given page.
PageRank measures the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each
time a site links to your site, Google sees it as a vote for your website. This shows Google your site is popular and, therefore, relevant to more people.
Optimizing your website so that Google sees it as the most relevant choice for your chosen keyword is where SEO comes in. SEO involves optimizing the code on your website so that Google can easily crawl it, doing keyword analysis, link building, social networking, and providing high quality content in the form of blogs and articles.
Since a ranking in the top three of Google is so lucrative, there are people and companies working constantly to move their own or their client's websites into those top spots. At the same time, hackers are working just as hard to create ways around Google's parameters to "game the system" for fun and profit. Google must react quickly to these threats, since their reputation depends on delivering the most relevant results to their customers. As you can
imagine, the science of SEO is changing daily, hourly...minutely.
Most business owners have neither the time, nor the know-how to keep up with the complex and ever changing world of SEO. Understanding the vital importance of SEO, most will elect to hire a professional to handle the many aspects of SEO a website requires to rise in the rankings and be as profitable as possible.
Doug Holt, owner of Doug Holt Online - Internet Strategists and Business Consultants in Santa Barbara explains, "It's always best practice to hire a professional to do a job for you in a given field that you're not an expert in. You use a dentist for your teeth, a plumber to fix your sewage, and a doctor to help when you're sick. The same goes for business - do what you do best and hire the rest." Good advice.
