Wednesday, May 9, 2012
A search on any search engine for a well known keyword yields thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of results. In such a situation, how a website manages to feature among the topmost results of a search for a specific keyword is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The reason behind the increasing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the presence of the website in top search results aids in attracting more visitors to it, which very often converts into more business.
SEO can be divided into black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Black hat SEO entails somewhat unethical ways to get a website to the top of the search rankings. In contrast, white hat SEO abides by all the principles prescribed by the search engines and concentrates on the techniques which are commonly accepted.
To connect a particular web page to a particular keyword, the search engines earlier used the Meta data of the page that has been made a part of the code of that page. However, these days a significant number of search engines make use of extremely sophisticated algorithms, involving the use of more than 200 distinct parameters to decide on the results.
SEO specialists try to figure out the relevance of many components in the search algorithms and stay in touch with the latest modifications that are brought about by different search engines. This information aids them in updating the SEO strategies for their customers to enable them to figure in top results of well known keywords. When the search results were exclusively dependent on Meta data and the content of the web page, this job involved optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and making sure that the keyword density of every page was just right.
Although these aspects are still quite important, search engines now give much more priority to the popularity of a web page. The popularity of a web page is judged based on the number of links to it from other web pages. This method is democratic in nature, where every link is like a vote for the particular web page. Because of this major change, SEO now also involves a lot of offsite tactics like giving away free content to get embedded links, and developing an external presence through blogs and other forms of social media.
The most important thing to keep in mind about SEO is that it is not static. The field is always changing and your strategies have to adjust to those changes. That is the reason why it is so critical to engage an experienced SEO consultant to help you.
SEO can be divided into black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Black hat SEO entails somewhat unethical ways to get a website to the top of the search rankings. In contrast, white hat SEO abides by all the principles prescribed by the search engines and concentrates on the techniques which are commonly accepted.
To connect a particular web page to a particular keyword, the search engines earlier used the Meta data of the page that has been made a part of the code of that page. However, these days a significant number of search engines make use of extremely sophisticated algorithms, involving the use of more than 200 distinct parameters to decide on the results.
SEO specialists try to figure out the relevance of many components in the search algorithms and stay in touch with the latest modifications that are brought about by different search engines. This information aids them in updating the SEO strategies for their customers to enable them to figure in top results of well known keywords. When the search results were exclusively dependent on Meta data and the content of the web page, this job involved optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and making sure that the keyword density of every page was just right.
Although these aspects are still quite important, search engines now give much more priority to the popularity of a web page. The popularity of a web page is judged based on the number of links to it from other web pages. This method is democratic in nature, where every link is like a vote for the particular web page. Because of this major change, SEO now also involves a lot of offsite tactics like giving away free content to get embedded links, and developing an external presence through blogs and other forms of social media.
The most important thing to keep in mind about SEO is that it is not static. The field is always changing and your strategies have to adjust to those changes. That is the reason why it is so critical to engage an experienced SEO consultant to help you.
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