Basics of SEO: The new BIG thing

Search engine optimization

The SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a method of increasing a website’s traffic by means of search results. Lately, it has been such an emerging technique which every other site present on the web wishes to have, in order to improve their site’s web traffic and hence it’s ranking.

It is no secret that one tends to visit the sites which appears first in our search results as they happen to be relevant and contain what we are looking from using our keyword. A site which is well optimized for SEO will appear higher in the search results, thus providing itself a huge traffic of visitors and improving its ranking thereby. This is one of the best ways to grow their web presence.

 Editing the content and coding of a site by restructuring its HTML according to the relevant and specific keywords is how a website is primarily optimized. The group of people who perform this task for their clients are called Search Engine Optimizers and they provide SEO as a completely independent service or a part of a large and extensive market campaign.

Any site which is vying to be a search engine friendly site needs its internal contents and structure optimized, which in other means its management system, images, videos and menus need to be tweaked in order for the search engine to place it higher in its search results so that the site gets the maximum exposure.

In the mid-nineties when the internet was still in its nascent stage, the content providers started tweaking the web content of their sites while the early search engines were still in the process of cataloguing the whole World Wide Web. Earlier, the indexing of sites was quite simple a task. A webmaster was just required to submit the webpage’s URL to the search engines, which would later send its own automated program called “Spider” that visits the site’s pages and collect all the links originating from that particular page. This particular process is called “Crawling” and this was how indexing of sites was done. Meanwhile the second program of the search engines called “indexer” would gather all sorts of information and their location, along with the keywords and then stored to be crawled later.

The primitive algorithms which the search engines employed then were dependent on a website’s information like meta-tag, keywords or phrases and the index files. The webmasters gradually learnt how to optimize their web content’s attributes so as to rank higher in the search engines result.

After nearly a decade, most of the search engines had integrated many unrevealed aspects in their algorithms so as to decrease the widespread link manipulation by the web content providers. For example the leading search engine Google has more than 200 factors to rank a site.

The search engine optimizing techniques are typically divided into 2 types: White hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO is like web development which encourages approachability and its results have a long time effect, on the other hand black hat SEO improves web ranking by implementing methods which are not promoted by the search engines.