SEO is the practice of developing/designing your site, especially your content in a fashion that boosts your rankings in the search engines, so that you drive more “free” traffic to your site. The search engines, especially Google, make a fuss about how intelligent their algorithms are for determining relevance (the holy grail of search engine results), and yet just by looking at the terms this site has pulled up for, I can tell you that we’re still a ways off from really quality relevance.

Of course, most people using a search engine can tell you the same thing, just by the fact that it’s very rare all the results relate to what you are actually looking for.

But since I can see which terms I’m pulling up for (i.e. *desktop backgrounds of love*), I can examine where those exact words appear in my site (are they in the title, in the URL, in a link, etc) and try to figure out how Google is weighting them in their algorithm, then adjust appropriately to try and drive more traffic.

It’s not something I actually do, especially not on this site, but it’s definitely interesting to watch. There’s a whole gaggle of Google-watchers (sorry, couldn’t resist) over at WebMasterWorld—just lurk in their forums for a while and you can pick up a ton of information.