You may have heard of SEO before. It’s a term bandied around the Internet like it’s a golden ticket to online success. Lots of characters out there on the Internet will claim to be SEO gurus, SEO analysts and basically anything with SEO attached to the title, and it may seem like everyone’s in on the secret except you. So what is SEO all about? How do you do it? And how much of a difference does it really make?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and the practice’s main goal is getting websites to the top of search engine results. Since the vast majority of traffic is nowadays directed by search, these top positions can mean huge view numbers – and huge advertising dollars. Each search engine operates using different algorithms, which influences how SEO efforts are conducted (Google, for example, uses the famous Page Rank system, whereby a page’s influence is calculated by how many other sites link to it). So SEO for Google might involve getting friends to link to your blog, while SEO for Yahoo or Bing might involve the keywords you use to describe your site.

Other activities which fall under the umbrella of SEO may include tagging your blog posts, using specific keywords in your content, or even the structure of your site. All these practices may help you increase your site’s traffic and core readership.

Or they may not. Just how important SEO is to online success is a subject of constant and often fierce debate. Many SEO activities – like creating empty sites for more links, spamming keywords, and creating filler content – are considered annoying and can often get you banned from the major search engines. It’s also sometimes hard to track the yield from what SEO experts do: simple activities like concise writing and tagging can be done by anyone who’s willing to learn. In this author’s opinion, SEO is a lot like Vitamin C: a little won’t hurt, but don’t go overboard either. SEO is just another part of online promotion, not the be all and end all – despite what the hype may claim.