SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process used to improve the quality and volume of incoming traffic towards an intended website or a group of websites from searches made on various search engines. It works using the "algorithmic" or "organic" search results techniques on pre targeted keywords. The rank of any site in a result from a search is decided by the position of the website in the search results; the earlier the higher. The concept is straightforward and logical, the earlier the site is listed in the search; the higher is the number of people who will check the site for references. Another variation of the SEO can help the webmasters to target other types of searches like image searching, industry specific search engines and local search. The necessity of increasing traffic onto a website is purely a marketing strategy for many. Higher the traffic, more popular is the site and better is the business or throughput from the website. To increase the site's relevance to a particular set of keywords, the Search Engine Optimization uses the core concept of search algorithms that are being implemented by the search engine and the more general data of what the people who can benefit from the site are searching for. The efforts used towards Search Engine Optimization are included in the coding of the site, its presentation and the underlying structure on which the site is developed. The Search Engine Optimization also fixes any problem that can prevent the search engine's indexing programs (crawlers) from spidering the site completely. Other efforts implemented, which can be easily seen by everyone are addition of smart content to the website that will help the search engines crawlers to index the sites easily and also by making the site more appealing for a general user. Another distinct class of Search Engine Optimization techniques is called the spamdexing or the black hat Search Engine Optimization that uses methods like keyword stuffing and link farming. But these methods tend to reduce the quality of the end user experience. The search engines then looks for such sites and blocks out the sites from their indexed data. Optimization of search engines started in the mid nineties, around the same time that few of the initial search engines were indexing the early internet data. At that time, all that was required from a webmaster was to submit a webpage or a URL to the various search engines and the search engines would send their spider to crawl the required page(s). The spiders also extracted links to other pages present in the main page. The information was then returned to the indexer utility and indexed for efficient searching. The process is divided into three stages: first a page is downloaded from the web and stored on the server used by the search engines and then another program which is called the indexer reads the page and extracts the useful information about the page like the words that the page contains, location of these words, the frequency of occurrence of the words, and the links contained in the page and finally the data is placed in a scheduler which decides when the crawling has to take place. With the development of search engines and the increase in their popularity, the site owners started to acknowledge their importance. The ranks and visibility of a page in search engines were of utmost importance if someone wanted their site to be popular and have greater inbound traffic. As explained, the early versions of the search engine algorithms depended on the information provided by the respective webmasters that included the keywords, index file information, Meta tag etc. the Meta tags contained the guide to the content of each page in the website. But soon it became apparent that the data provided by the webmasters were not reliable and not in actual relevance to the actual keywords present in the site. The data provided from the webmasters were just to make the site more relevant in every popular search and give their websites a false high rank in the search engine's ranking algorithm. Inconsistent, incomplete and inaccurate data resulted in a huge number of irrelevant search results from the search engine scarring its popularity. By the year 1997, the search engines found out that some of the webmasters were intentionally making efforts towards increasing the rank of their sites by providing false data. Some of the search engines then made changes in their algorithm to bar the webmasters from their efforts in rank manipulation. The spamdexing was located as the most popular form of falsifying the page's real usefulness and methods were taken to counter the efforts. The importance of the targeted searches created conflicts between the search engines and the search engine optimizers. An annual conference called as AIRWeb (Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web) was held in the year 2005 to discuss the methods to be employed to reduce the degrading effects from the content provided by the aggressive webmasters. A simple observation is that a search will be scanned from top to bottom for finding the optimum requirements. If the website is placed near the top of the list returned by the search engines, there is a higher probability of the searchers visiting the site, hence increasing the network traffic to that website. However, further researches showed that the higher rankings in the search engine did not guarantee higher sales for the website owner. Sometimes, SEO may not be the best approach towards the website marketing. There are other marketing strategies for businesses that can be a lot more effective and powerful. A well designed marketing campaign for any website on the internet can drive much higher traffics towards the websites. Some of them include sponsored links on the search engine, designing better websites among others. However, Search Engine Optimization still remains one of the good methods to make one's website popular. Visit the website http://www.moovinonup.com/ for more information and SEO website creation. |
