Hundreds of thousands of results will appear before the user on searching for a popular topic on any search engine. In this competitive situation, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a firm to come within the top search results for a query relating to a particular word. The reason behind the increasing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the appearance of the website in top search results aids in attracting more visitors to it, which very often translates into more business.
Black hat and white hat are the two basic classifications of SEO techniques. The tools used in black hat SEO to push the website in the top results are not seen as fair practices. In contrast, white hat SEO abides by all the rules laid down by the search engines and concentrates on the techniques which are commonly accepted.
The search engines in the past matched a webpage with the search for a particular word by making use of Meta data, which is generally embedded in the code of a webpage. However, these days most search engines use highly complex algorithms, entailing the use of over 200 distinct parameters to come up with the results.
SEO experts try to figure out the relevance of many components in the search algorithms and keep in touch with the newest modifications that are brought about by different search engines. This knowledge aids them in improving the SEO strategies for their customers to propel them to appear in top results of well known keywords. For the older algorithms, which utilized only the Meta data and web site content, the optimization method used was to bring the desnity of a keyword on the page to an appropriate level and dealing with the Meta tags of the page.
Despite the continued importance of the onsite aspects, the search engines now put much more emphasis on how popular a page is. The popularity of a particular web page is determined by the number of other pages linking to it. It is more like a democratic process as every link to the web page can be seen as a vote. Because of this, now SEO has to focus on offsite techniques too, like offering content for free to receive embedded links and establishing a presence on online hubs for social interaction, such as blogs, forums etc.
The most crucial factor to remember about SEO is that it is not static. The field is constantly changing and your techniques have to adapt to those changes. That is the reason why it is so important to hire an experienced SEO consultant to assist you.
www.magicwebs.com.sg and Magic Webs. This article, What Is SEO? is available for free reprint.