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Search Engine Optimization
SEO Explained!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set
of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine
listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out
optimization projects on behalf of client sites.
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History
SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the
early Web. Many site owners quickly learned to appreciate the value of a new
listing in a search engine, as they observed sharp spikes in traffic to their
sites.
Site owners soon began submitting their site URLs to the engines on a regular
basis, and began modifying their site to accommodate the needs of search engine
spiders, the software programs sent out to explore the Web. Special features
such as meta tags became a common feature of sites that sought out high-ranking
listings in search engine result pages (the so-called "SERPs").
Consultant firms arose to serve the needs of these site owners, and attempted to
develop an understanding of the search engines' internal logic, or algorithms.
The goal was to develop a set of practices for copywriting, site coding, and
submissions that would ensure maximum exposure for a website.
Controversy
Main article: Spamdexing
As the industry developed, search engines quickly became wary of unscrupulous
SEO firms that attempted to generate traffic for their customers at any cost
(the most common problem being search results' decreasing relevance). One
frequent practice, called keyword spamming, involved the insertion of random
text at the bottom of a webpage, colored to match the background of the page.
The inserted text usually included words that were frequently searched (such as
sex), with the goal of getting rankings, and thus access to large streams of
traffic. The search engines responded with a continuous series of
countermeasures, designed to filter out the "noise" generated by these
artificial techniques. In turn, several SEO firms developed ever-more-subtle
techniques to influence rankings.
Reconciliation
In the early 2000s, search engines and SEO firms attempted to establish an
unofficial truce. There are several tiers of SEO firms, and the most reputable
companies employ content-based optimizations which meet with the search engines'
(reluctant) approval. These techniques include improvements to site navigation
and copywriting, designed to make websites more intelligible to search engine
algorithms.
Search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent
sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of
paid inclusion, search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the
optimization community.
Paid inclusion
Paid inclusion is a fee-based model for submitting website listings to search
engines. Historically, search engines have allowed webmasters, as well as SEOs
and the general public, to freely submit sites for consideration. However, a
pattern of abuse began to develop among less-reputable SEO firms, who flooded
the engines with non-stop submissions of pages. Analysis of these submissions
strained the search engines' capacity, necessitating the creation of artificial
limits, including fees.
The fee structure is used by search engines as a filter against superfluous
submissions, and also as a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an
annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be cataloged on a
regular basis. Search engines still offer free submit forms, but make no
promises as to the timeliness of the cataloging process through this channel.
Google has a particularly ethical way of handling paid placement. Their main
results are uninfluenced by payments, but paid "AdWords" drive small, visually
distinct text-only ads, so the user is able to tell which matches were the
result of a payment. Google also uses various methods to prevent paid placement
of truly irrelevant content.
Ethical and unethical SEO methods
To obtain maximum search engine visibility, it is essential to understand how
the target audience is searching for actual information on a web site. When the
target audience uses a search engine to find products and services, they type a
set of words or phrases into the search box. This set of words is commonly
called targeted keywords or phrases.
For the target audience to find a site on the search engines, the page must
contain keyword phrases that match the phrases the target audience is typing
into search queries.
When a search engine spider analyzes a web page, it determines keyword relevancy
based on an algorithm, which is a formula that calculates how web pages are
ranked. The most important text for a search engine is the most important text
for the target audience - the text your target audience is going to read when
they arrive at your web site.
At its worst, SEO becomes spamdexing, the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly
commercial, pages through taking advantage of the search algorithms. Indeed,
many search engine administrators say that any form of search engine
optimization used to improve a website's page rank is spamdexing. However, over
time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are
not acceptable means of boosting one's search engine placement and resultant
traffic.
Arguably, the most ethical method is to have worthwhile content on one's Web
site, to which many other Web sites will voluntarily link. There are also few
who would question the ethics of informing other relevant sites around the web
of one's own content and asking for links, although as relevance diminishes this
becomes a more dubious practice.
Equally, virtually no one would question the ethics of choosing the vocabulary
of your site (and especially of your page titles) to emphasize words that you
know are often searched for by people in your market. Again, the ethics of this
becomes shadier if the words in question are not relevant.
It is certainly ethical (in fact it is highly recommended) to add a "site map"
page to your site, linked either from the home page or from every page on your
site. Such a page guarantees that once a spider has found your site, it will be
able to traverse and index the entire site.
Cloaking — any of several means to serve up a different page to the
search-engine spider than will be seen by human users — is one of the most
controversial methods of search engine optimization. To wit, cloaking can be an
illegitimate attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a
particular Web site. On the other hand, it can be used to provide human users
with more or less equivalent content that a search engine would not be able to
process or parse. Another ethical use of cloaking is providing accessibility to
Web sites for blind people and people with other disabilities. A good benchmark
on whether a given act of cloaking is ethical is precisely whether it enhances
accessibility.
Link spam — Occasionally a problem for some search engines such as Google, which
can be fooled into assigning higher relevance to a site based on thousands of
inbound links that weren't properly "earned" by the site. Google's sensitivity
to linking makes it susceptible to webmasters who solicit or place links
randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of
the inbound link. Commonly called "Googlebombing", it can be a prank (type
"miserable failure" into Google to demonstrate), or a deliberate attempt to
influence ranking for commercial gain.
Unethical techniques
Mirror sites
Doorway pages
Cloaking
Link farms
Googleating
Keyword stuffing
These are all widely acknowledged as being spam, or "black hat".
The source of this article is
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this
article is licensed under the
GFDL
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