Search Engine Optimization is the process of driving targeted traffic from search engines to a website.

Learning this process is not possible without understanding how search engines work. And when I talk about understanding search engines, I am specifically talking about:

• How search engines index (read) websites

• How search engines rank websites

• Why search engines change their ranking algorithms

• How (and when) search engines update their algorithms

Points 1 and 2 are relatively easy to grasp (even if #2 is the main reason SEO is such a thriving industry). There is plenty of misinformation, but if you have the right sources, practice SEO yourself and learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, you will have a pretty good idea of how search engines rank websites (the next chapter gets stuck into ranking factors in detail).

Points 3 and 4 give SEOs a lot of grief, mainly because:

• Changes in the ranking algorithms can cause site rankings to change, and there is the possibility of your

website losing its high rankings.

• Not knowing when search engines update their algorithms (at least until you start seeing significant

changes or someone in the forums notices it) means webmasters never know when their rankings could

be negatively impacted by a search engine.

The unpredictability of search engines (SE) means that if traffic from search engines is your only source of traffic, and your websites are your only source of income, your livelihood hinges on the whims of Google.

That is a very scary thought, and is the primary cause for much of the ‘panicking’ you see (or will see) in SEO forums whenever SE updates are discussed.

Do not place all your bets on one mode of income. If your traffic is primarily from search engines, diversify and get traffic from forums and other websites, as well as building a regular readership. If your income is primarily from running AdSense ads on your websites, diversify into affiliate marketing, creating your own products, etc. You can get more knowledge about making money online reading this interesting blog - Make Money Online Tips.

And if all your bets are hinged on your online income, diversify further and think about making money offline as well.

Smart money-making principles transcend industries and the offline / online divide. Once again:

Do NOT place all your bets on one website, one mode of traffic, one mode of income, or one source of income.

Diversify.

The second important thing to note is this:

If you know what the search engines want, it is easy to plan ahead and shape your SEO campaign as such that each ‘update’ actually benefits your site rankings.

Think about that for a second – usually, search engine algorithms are a time when webmasters scramble to find out whether their sites have lost their #1 rankings or not.

What if you could set up a system that allowed your sites’ search engine rankings to improve every time Google or Yahoo did an algorithm update?

That is going to be a recurring theme throughout this blog, and that is one of the main targets that I have set out to achieve here.

So how do search engines work really? Keep reading this blog to find out.