This chapter is intended to familiarize you with the basic principles of search engine optimization, including the terminology used. As noted at the outset, the philosophy that is promoted in this book focuses on SEO as an on-going process, intended to optimize a website to perform its best on the search engines. Throughout this book, the techniques discussed will all emphasize this process-oriented approach to SEO.
At the conclusion of this chapter you should have gained an awareness of the most commonly used terms in the SEO field, and you should have also gained insights into what is indexed by the search engines and how it is used to produce search engine results. We stated at the beginning of this chapter the importance of quality and original content; at the end of this chapter, where we provided an example of how a search engine spider views your page, you can see again how the content is the key to your efforts.
In the next chapter, we take our first steps towards laying the foundations of SEO for your site, as we look at the default SEO options that are available in your Joomla! site.