The easiest way to explain the concept of Search Engine Optimization to a layman is to liken the Internet to a chaotic desk and search engines to an elaborate filing system designed to make the scores of information on the Net accessible to us mere mortals. In keeping with this analogy you can then proceed to explain that if a web owner wants consumers to find and explore his or her website they have to make sure their site gets ‘filed’ correctly.
Being consumers ourselves, we know that we hardly ever glance at our search results past the second page. This means if you want a user to notice your site it has to rank within the first twenty websites listed (preferably the first ten) and with the Internet becoming an increasingly saturated advertising medium this can be much easier said than done. This is where SEO comes in. Optimizing a page means it gets more visible and hence more accessible. There are many ways to optimizing a website, but they can be broken into two main categories: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.
