Saturday, May 12, 2012

What Is SEO?

By Elise Marshall


Hundreds of thousands of results will be displayed on searching for a well known topic on any search engine. In such a competitive situation, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a company to come within the top search results for a search relating to a particular word. Getting to the top of a web search can attract more traffic for your website, leading to more business, and that is why SEO has attained such popularity in the past few years.

SEO can be categorized into black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Black hat SEO entails somewhat unaccepted means to make a website appear at the top of the search rankings. However, white hat SEO only uses those techniques which are largely accepted and do not violate the rules of the search engines.

In order to comprehend the significance of a web page for a specific keyword, search engines conventionally used the page's Meta data, which is inserted into the code of the page by webmasters. However, nowadays a significant number of search engines use extremely complex algorithms, entailing the use of over 200 distinct factors to come up with the results.

SEO professionals have to keep track of all the latest developments made by search engines and guess the relative weight of different factors in a search algorithm. Based on these findings, they improve the SEO techniques used by their customers so that their websites stay competitive. A few years back, when the search engines depended upon Meta data and the text on the page, this process needed optimizing Meta tags and ensuring a reasonable frequency with which a keyword existed on the page.

Although these factors are still quite significant, search engines now give much more priority to the popularity of a web page. The popularity of a web page is estimated based on how many inbound links it has from other web pages. Each link is therefore taken as a vote for the page and the algorithm becomes democratic in nature. Because of this, now SEO has to focus on offsite techniques as well, such as providing content for free to get embedded links and establishing a presence on online hubs for social interaction, such as blogs, forums etc.

The important aspect of SEO to be always remembered is that it is not a one time activity. SEO techniques are always getting updated to the changes occurring in the field of online search. That is why it is so important to have a good SEO consultant help you out.




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