SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION-SIMPLIFIED

This is the era of fierce competition, where only the fittest survive. There's struggle for existence as each one strives to be on the top.
Technological advancements have made our lives easier, with facilities available just at the touch of a button. Come any problem, the internet hosts a variety of pages, blogs, websites, etc to cater to our needs. And no, that's not it all. We have a variety of sources to choose from, for every bit we search. Thanks to the search engines, which list out the websites, pages, blogs, etc. before us. And what's more, the search engines list the search results in the order - most helpful results on the top, making it easier for us to choose from.

But how do these search engines work?

Well, it's simple. Let us consider the following example:
A man named Qwerty runs a business of some Asdf service. In the beginning he gets very few or absolutely no customers. But he works very hard and improves his service provision efficiency. A few customers who have been served by him then publicize the business among their acquaintances. Qwerty works harder and harder to excel, and a huge crowd of customers begins to avail of his Asdf services.
Greater the number of customers, greater becomes his popularity. And thus, greater the popularity, the number of times people will reccomend his company, for anyone requiring Asdf services, will be greater.

This is exactly how a search engine works.
Qwerty is the page, Asdf is the service, solution or answer that is searched for by the user, and the publicizing customers are search engines.
The greater is your page's popularity, the higher will it appear on the search results presented by the search engine.
The search engine also analyses popularity of any website by assesing the number of backlinks to the website. Backlinks are the links provided on any website that redirect users, on clicking them, to your website.

But the above example implies that, to popularize one's webpage, the only thing that can be done is hard work.
Well, hard work sure, is a must, but for greater work returns, smart work is equally essential.
When smart work increases the popularity or visibilty of your webpage smartly, it is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Now let's modify the above example to understand SEO:
Qwerty sets up his business of service Asdf, with very few customers in the beginning. So he works hard to improvise the services. But Qwerty is smart. To supplement his hard work, he adopts a smart method. He ties-up with various organisations, companies, etc which provide services related to Asdf. He convinces them to refer their clients in the need of Asdf service to him. He thus generates even greater amount of customer's.

And this is just how SEO works.
Here Qwerty is the webpage, Asdf is the searched for result/service, and the tie-ups are well, the backlinks.

Search Engine Optimization is the latest trend that is being used by almost all the websites. It is the fastest way to have your site feature on the top in the search results.
Website creators generate similar 'tie-ups' with other website owners with related content i.e. they convince them to display backlinks to the the content of your website. Though usually free, some It is advisable that one distributes links, to every post or article or service, etc. that is the content of your website, as backlinks.
Often if your page content is indeed wonderful, and a webpage owner feels that its worth sharing, he/she may provide a link, without you asking, to your content on their webpage. Such a link is called as a organic link.
Thus, to have good amount of webpages hosting your backlinks, a wonderful, regularly updated, appealing content is extremely important.
Previously the Search engines used to count backlinks on every website, even if it wasn't related to the website content. But after the development of Google's Penguin Algorithm, backlinks only on the related websites are counted.Also such backlinks present on 'top featuring' sites are only counted.
Thus to efficiently perform search engine optimization it is essential that the website content be extremely helpful and wonderful.
SEO is like smartly manipulating your page in order to meet the requirements for the search engine to feature your page on the top.Smart work is the driving force to success. And this very force in the form of SEO has helped many to achieve success in a shorter span of time. SEO can be defined as a smart short-cut to increase your site's visibility. Search Engine Optimization has indeed proved to be a boon for all.