SEO Explained in plain English

Meta-tags - these are hidden areas within the website that tell search engines what the site is all about.

Meta-data - this is text within the meta-tags ie the title, description & keywords relevant to the web page.

Title - this is the most important meta-tag section of the page (currently) in relation to Google & Yahoo and how these search engines rank your page against all the others in their indexes.

Description - this is the second most important meta-tag section of the page (currently) in relation to Google & Yahoo and how these search engines rank your page against all the others in their indexes.  It is not meant to be a list of keywords but a proper description of the web page.

Keywords - this is the least important meta-tag section of the page (currently) in relation to Google & Yahoo and how these search engines rank your page against all the others in their indexes.  Keywords should be relevant to the page and not be repeated more than 6 times.

Content - this is the actual detail - text & images on the web page.  For SEO purposes it must be readable by the visitor and make sense to the search engines.

Search Engines - search engines catalogue the content of websites and rank each website relevant to each other for each and any words searched.  How a website ranks in the results shown for each particular search term depends on a number of differing criterea and according to each search engine.  Some may rank the content of one website higher than another depending upon the way a website is laid out compared to another.  That is why you get different results from Google to Yahoo, Ask, MSN etc.

Search Results - it is impossible for anyone to guarantee to get top placement on some, any or all search engines.  Google (see above) will rank sites higher differently to other search engines so what works for one doesn't necessarily work for another.  Generally people use the top 5 placings in search results to make their selection.  Beyond the first page of search results will rarely yield any internet traffic.

SEO - SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization - the process of layoing out a website for best performance within search engines.

Flash - Flash is a series of images that appear to move.  A little like a movie on line.  As Flash is image based any sections on a web page are invisible to search engines.

Conversion Architecture - The website is put together using tried and tested means to provide the easiest path for both the visitor to the website and also search engine spiders.  The logic behind this is to remove obstacles to people buying or signing up for products or services and to make it easy for search engines to list the website in their directories.

Spidering & crawling programs - these are programs written to trawl through all the pages of websites throughout the Internet and record data from each page.  They follow links from page to page to page and from website to website.  Data is ranked against each other page in the database relative to others.

Organic listings - these are the search results shown by a search engine listed in the order that would appear to be most relevant first, least relevant at the bottom.  It is not possible to pay to appear higher in these search results however some paid ads are shown at the top of the organic listings.  These are generally shaded or marked in some way to differentiate them from the organic listings.