SEO is important, but what is it?

SEO is optimizing your website so search engines can index your content easily and, through following best practices, rank your website in search results for the keywords you're targeting as high as possible.

How do search engines work?

• They have bots that crawl the internet going from website to website.
• When they reach your website, the bots (which are glorified scripts) click every link and build out a map of links on your website.
• Once they map your website's structure, they parse, store, and weight the contents.
• Then they send all this information back to the mothership (Google) and they use an algorithm to rank your website amongst other websites for search queries (keywords).

Every large search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask) uses their own proprietary algorithm.