SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines are powerful tools. We rely on them quite often to find whatever we are looking for. Search engines try to sort by relevance and do so using complicated 'formulas' (ie Google's PageRank). Google for instance assumes that sites that are being mentioned and linked to a lot, must be more important. The context in which this linking takes place (ie anchor tag contents) is also taken into account. The ranking order can have immense consequences to the websites being sorted. Needless to say everyone wants the highest rank. In comes search engine optimization.

Fair stuff
It is in everyone's interest (you, the user and the search engine) that your relevant content is indexed, and is so correctly. Google provides webmasters with various tools to catalyze this. For instance webmasters can provide sitemaps and help Google find out what's where and what has been updated when.

Manipulation
Knowing (vaguely) the ranking formulas, one can manipulate things in ones advantage, regardless of the relevance. This may be the way to go for those websites that contain nothing but SEO text and ads, but otherwise I wouldn't go there. Of course it is important to do the most obvious things, such as getting your site indexed correctly. Next, you better just make sure you have a darn good website. If you want to get things rolling, spent the rest of your money on PR, not on SEO.

Final note
Actually this post is merely a prelude to a few concepts involving SEO that I came across when looking at my Blogger Statistics, namely SEO ping and Referrer Spam. I dug into it a little and will discuss these in a separate post.