Search engine optimization, abbreviated SEO, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural, organic or algorithmic, search results for targeted keywords.
Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results.They also recognised that the higher their site ranking the more people would click on the website.
The earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site.
As a strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what everyone is searching for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site along with increasing presence of the site on the internet.
The process search engines are using, involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provided a guide to each page's content.
Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.
By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters.
Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed "backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages.
PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998.
Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as on-page factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank.
By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation.
Undisclosed factors in ranking algorithms of major search engines:
Our Rating:
An unacceptable praxis, considering how widely these engines are used. Be aware of the bias towards monetizing and try to find alternative ways of retrieving information on the internet!
The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages.
Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs.
Yahoo's paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors.
Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.
Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.
SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.
An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether
It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.
SEO as a service definition was first brought to attention by the United States Patent and Trademark Organization in application number 77171330.
