Ask: What is SEO? And why does your website need it? And how has it changed?

Ask: What is SEO? And why does your website need it? 

SEO = Search Engine Optimization

is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic (non-paid directly to Search Engines) search engine results.  Search engines (ex. Google, Yahoo, Bing) will crawl, measure, and rank websites based on different factors and their own algorithm.  These weight of these factors may change throughout the years due to bad players trying the game the system.

Previously, due to some players who tried keyword stuffing the website (increase the number of count of the keywords to be read by bots), buying backlinks, created content for bots instead of humans, and other ways to trick search engines, these Search Engines updated their algorithms to de-rank this Back Hot SEO websites.

Currently, they include, relevancy to the searched keyword (where I worked at Yahoo! In 2004, I designed the mapping priorities), tagging, headlines, backlinks, ancher text, high-quality content, and etc (there’s some debate about how these factors’ importance changed)

Ultimately, Search Engines want users to find what they are looking for.  SEO is how search engines rank websites organically by the information they can capture.  The ranking algorithm will change depending on how websites behave (such as black hat SEO).  So always practice white hat SEO.