Search engine optimization (
SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a
website or a
web page in a
search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "natural," "
organic,"
or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the
search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search
results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's
users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including
image search,
local search,
video search,
academic search,
[1] news search and industry-specific
vertical search engines.
As an
Internet marketing
strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search
for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and
which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.
Optimizing a website may involve editing its content,
HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the
indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of
backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
The plural of the abbreviation SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", those who provide SEO services.
Relationship with search engines
By 1997, search engine designers recognized that
webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even
manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as
Altavista and
Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.
[25]
In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information
Retrieval on the Web was created to bring together practitioners and
researchers concerned with search engine optimisation and related
topics.
[26]
Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the
Wall Street Journal reported on a company,
Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.
[27] Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.
[28] Google's
Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.
[29]
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and
are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and
seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to
help with site optimization.
[30][31] Google has a
Sitemaps
program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems
indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the
website.
[32] Bing Webmaster Tools
provides a way for webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allows
users to determine the crawl rate, and track the web pages index
status.
Getting indexed
Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to guess which
websites a user seeks. In this diagram, if each bubble represents a web
site, programs sometimes called spiders examine which sites link
to which other sites, with arrows representing these links. Websites
getting more inbound links, or stronger links, are presumed to be more
important and what the user is searching for. In this example, since
website B is the recipient of numerous inbound links, it ranks more
highly in a web search. And the links "carry through", such that website
C, even though it only has one inbound link, has an inbound link from a
highly popular site (B) while site E does not. Note: percentages are
rounded.
The leading search engines, such as
Google,
Bing and
Yahoo!, use
crawlers
to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are
linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be
submitted because they are found automatically. Two major directories,
the Yahoo Directory and
DMOZ both require manual submission and human editorial review.
[33] Google offers
Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML
Sitemap
feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are
found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically
following links.
[34] Yahoo! formerly operated a paid submission service that guaranteed crawling for a
cost per click;
[35] this was discontinued in 2009.
[36]
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when
crawling
a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of
pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether
or not pages get crawled.
[37]
Preventing crawling
To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can
instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the
standard
robots.txt
file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be
explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a
meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the
root directory
is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will
instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search
engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion
crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented
from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts
and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches.
In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent
indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered
search spam.
[38]
Increasing prominence
A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results.
Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility.
[39]
Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as
to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to
increase traffic.
[39]
Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently
can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web
page's meta data, including the
title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic.
URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the
canonical link element[40] or via
301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page's link popularity score.
White hat versus black hat techniques
SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories:
techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and
those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search
engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them
spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either
white hat SEO, or
black hat SEO.
[41]
White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black
hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either
temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they
are doing.
[42]
An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search
engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine
guidelines
[30][31][43]
are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an
important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following
guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine
indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users,
not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible
to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its
intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web
development that promotes accessibility,
[44] although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO
attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the
search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text
that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an
invisible
div,
or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page
depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a
search engine, a technique known as
cloaking.
Another category sometimes used is
grey hat SEO.
This is in between black hat and white hat approaches where the methods
employed avoid the site being penalised however do not act in producing
the best content for users, rather entirely focused on improving search
engine rankings.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat
methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings
from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either
automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site
review. One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both
BMW Germany and
Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.
[45] Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.
[46]
As a marketing strategy
SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other
Internet marketing strategies can be more effective like paid
advertising through pay per click
(PPC) campaigns, depending on the site operator's goals.
[47]
A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building
high quality web pages to engage and persuade, setting up
analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's
conversion rate.
[48]
SEO may generate an adequate
return on investment.
However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their
algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.
Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies
heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search
engines stop sending visitors.
[49]
Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's
placement, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to
Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm
changes – almost 1.5 per day.
[50] It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.
[51
]
MORE TRAINING IF YOU NEEDS GO
FOR VEDIO TUTORIAL GO YOUTUBE
