Thursday, July 29, 2010

What Is SEO?

By Sophie Lim

Hundreds of thousands of results will be displayed on searching for a popular keyword on any search engine. In such a scenario, how a website manages to feature among the top results of a query for a specific keyword is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Figuring at the top of a web search means more traffic for your website, leading to more business, and that is why SEO has gained such prominence in the past few years.

There are two kinds of SEO - white hat and black hat. Black hat means use of techniques, which are usually frowned upon, for making a site feature in top results. In contrast, white hat SEO abides by all the principles prescribed by the search engines and concentrates on the techniques which are largely approved of.

In order to understand the relevance of a web page for a particular keyword, search engines conventionally used the page's Meta data, which is inscribed into the code of the page by webmasters. However, nowadays most search engines make use of highly complex algorithms, entailing the use of over 200 distinct parameters to decide on the results.

SEO experts have to keep track of all the new developments made by search engines and find out the relative weight of each of the factors in a search algorithm. Based on these findings, they enhance the SEO techniques used by their customers so that their websites remain competitive. When the search results were only reliant on Meta data and the content of the web page, this task 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 crucial even today, the popularity of the web page is now more significant for the search engines. The popularity of a web page is estimated based on how many inbound links it has from other web pages. Every single link is thus taken as a vote for the page and the system becomes democratic in nature. Because of this significant change, SEO now also involves several offsite tactics like giving away free content to get inbound links, and creating an extended presence through blogs and other forms of social media.

The most crucial factor to remember about SEO is that it is quite dynamic. SEO strategies are constantly trying to adapt to the changes occurring in the field of online search. That is why it is so important to have an expert SEO consultant help you out.

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