SEO

Search Engine Optimisation

The term search engine optimisation or SEO was coined in 1997 to refer to techniques used to enhance the ranking of their websites in search engines. Since 1997, SEO has become a specialty of its own, with professional SEO consultants who help to ensure that their clients’ web pages receive high rankings in search results.

What is SEO?

SEO is a group of practices that can be employed to improve how high a search engine ranks a website. When a new web page is encountered by a search engine like Google, it is indexed. To be indexed means that the site has been added to the search engine’s database and will be displayed when users search for content that is relevant. The page rank determines where it is placed on the results list; with higher rank being nearer to the beginning and thus more likely to be seen.

Indexing is carried out by software programs called spiders and web crawlers, which look through web pages for things like key words, links from other websites, meta tags(tags within the HTML that describe the content of a web page), etc., which they use to rank a page. SEO is the process of optimizing all of the qualities a web crawler will look for so that the page will be highly ranked.

Search Engine Marketing refers to paying for placement in a search engine or pay per click advertisement (PPC). Instead of focusing on keywords and meta tags, some individuals pay search engines to rank their pages near the top of the list. In fact, SEM has made it all the more important for individuals who cannot afford to pay for ranking to engage in SEO. Major search engines try to strike a balance between paid placement and sites that rely strictly on SEO.

SEO on Wikipedia

Can Anyone Optimize a Webpage?

Anyone can try to optimize a web page, but the process has become so complex that it is a good idea to hire a search engine optimisation professional or a SEO company. In 1997, SEO was relatively straightforward, but over the years, unscrupulous web developers added irrelevant and misleading content into their pages to achieve higher ranking. As a result, search engines had to become more sophisticated.

For example, keyword density cannot be too low or too high. If it is too low, the keywords will not be added to the website’s index and it will not show up when those terms are searched. If the keyword density is too high, the spider will suspect spam and will not rank the page. Professional SEO consultants understand these nuances and are able to tweak websites to ensure they are ranked as highly as possible.

Major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo do not publicly release the algorithms that their web crawlers use to rank pages. They do this to combat spam. In an effort to understand these algorithms, SEO professionals will read patents held by these companies and analyze aspects of the top ranked web pages in order to learn what web crawlers search for. Thus, it is imperative to hire a professional in SEO who can use his or her knowledge to ensure that a webpage has a fighting chance against the millions of sites on the internet and the SEM sites.