What is search engine optimization?
What do you do when you want to search for information
online? Type keywords on a famous search engine (perhaps
google, yahoo or msn), click the search button and click
on a link on the first page of the search results.
Imagine yourself as a website owner and you simply want
to improve the traffic of your webpage. It will be ideal
to have your URL appearing on the very first page of
search results, of course depending on the relevant
keywords typed. Heard it or not, Search engine
optimization (SEO) is a set of manners meant to
improving the ranking of a website in search engine
listings. Simple terms, the higher the ranking, the more
likely the website will appear in the first page of
search results, the more likely an internet user will
click on the URL and hence traffic.
Search engines use a formula, algorithm (for computing)
to influence how a site will rank in the results that
internet users will see. A range of steps and techniques
can be used to gain a high ranking for a particular
site. The methods are broken down into two categories,
namely "white hat SEO" and "black hat SEO"
The colours speak for themselves, basically, "white hat
SEO" includes methods like building content and the
quality of the site, more to the legal sense. "Black hat
SEO" involves tricks such as spamdexing or even
cloaking. Many would see black hat methods are an
unwarranted, deceptive way to manipulate the rankings of
one's site. Furthermore, they do not provide more
quality content to site users. More often than not
search engines condemn these 'illegal-like' approaches.
It all comes down to how concerned a webmaster is
towards ethical values and principles.
For the record, search engine optimization did not come
into existence until the year 1997, less than a decade
after search engines are born. The early aggressive
webmasters quickly took advantage, making efforts to
earn good rankings for their websites. With the increase
of SEO, there is a possibility of consequential
destructive relationship between Search engines and SEOs,
an annual conference named 'AIRWEB' was created in 2005
to discuss bridging the web and diminish chances of
damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
Some SEO techniques are seen as illegal whereby their
client's websites are prohibited from search engines.
With a good traffic chained from good SEO, marketing
online becomes crucial. Simply put it, more online
traffic, more eyes will feast on the websites contents,
a big smile on the webmaster's face. For example, a
website selling items can have a very good chance of
earning customers with more traffic; simple probability
theory can explain this. Even so, higher rankings do not
guarantee more sales but many are more than willing to
pay sky high prices for professional SEO companies
just to improve their site's traffic.
In short, Search engine optimization (SEO) is used to
improve rankings of websites so they can appear first
before others.
Why SEO?
The Internet is a blind alley. The people surfing
the internet do not know where the document they are
looking for exists. So they turn to search engine for
help.
Most of these people, will visit a site which comes up
on the first page. If you are on the first page, its
like the search engine saying, yeah this site is good.
On Page SEO Covers the following topics.
OFF Page SEO Covers the following topics.