This is the first of a series of articles that introduce you to the world of SEO.
This articles are intended to be a quick guide (for dummies and smarties) to the definition, the terminology, the objective and the tecniques used in SEO.

SEO Definition

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
The current definition of SEO according to wikipedia is

Search engine optimization (SEO) as a subset of search engine marketing seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

It’s perfect and clear… if you already know what SEO is :)
In simple words, SEO is everything you do to convince search engines that your site should appear in the first positions of their search results, in order to have more visitors.
Organic (also called algorithmic) search results are the ones that the search engines returns when you enter some words and hit the search button.
The page showed by search engines when you enter some keywords is also called SERP: Search Engine Results Page.
In the image below (you should click on it if you want to see something), a screenshot of the SERP result for SEO (let’s start using the SEO Slang! ;) ) as given by google, the results in the area highlighted in red are the organic or algorithmic search results, the green result is returned by google because it think I was looking for the stocks trends for Stora Enso Oyj (what’s that??), while the yellow results are sponsored links (i.e. people who paid for being there)

Summary

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization, something you do to get good ranking in search engines organic results
• Organic / Algorithmic results: the results given by a search engine according to his own ranking alghoritm (opposed to paid results)
• SERP: Search Engine Result Page, the page returned by a search engine with (organic and paid) results matching for a given keyword or phrase

The next post in SEO for Dummies will be “Do you really need SEO?“