SEO, for those of you who don't know and/or don't care, stands for Search Engine Optimization. People who are interested in driving traffic to their websites have all these different techniques to, essentially, "game" Google's search engine rankings in an attempt to get on the first page of searches (in the top ten results of a search) for a word or phrase.

If you happen to be selling something, it is to your advantage to get high search engine ranking, because most searchers can't be bothered to click past the first page or two of listings. So there's always been all this big brouhaha to use various means to increase your page's rank. Ideally Google wants you to offer your readers relevant, cogent content that might actually answer a question--for example, I tend to show up very high if people are searching for the story of Dorothy Sparks and Rocky Gorge, since (much to my continued amazement) I am one of the very few people who have actually wrote about it. (And no doubt YOU have never heard of Dorothy Sparks, either, unless you obsessively read the Craptacular and/or you have recently vacationed along the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire. I get a lot of hits for Dorothy during NH's foliage season.)

Google, in its quest to have its searches actually deliver relevant and worthwhile results for the searcher, has a very complex algorithm it uses (and changes) to determine if a particular web page does indeedy have something to do with the phrase being looked for. In the infancy of the internet, it looked mostly at the text of the HTML code, which includes both what you see on the screen and behind the scenes, so to speak. And that's where the gaming began.  MORE Mojo! »