Saturday, December 19, 2009

What is SEO?

By Ricky Lim

Hundreds of thousands of results will be displayed on searching for a well known topic on any search engine. In such a competitive scenario, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a firm to come within the top search results for a query relating to a specific word. The reason for the increasing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the presence of the website in top search results helps in attracting more visitors to it, which very often converts into more business.

There are two kinds of SEO - white hat and black hat. Black hat means use of methods, which are mostly frowned upon, for making a site appear in top results. However, white hat SEO only applies those techniques which are largely accepted and do not go against the principles of the search engines.

To connect a specific web page to a specific 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, major search engines now make use of complex algorithms to display the results that are filtered on the basis of more than 200 varied factors.

SEO consultants constantly attempt to guess the importance of different factors that play a role in the search algorithms and stay up to date with the changes that search engines make. Based on these findings, they improve the SEO methods used by their clients so that their websites stay competitive. For the earlier algorithms, which used only the Meta data and web site content, the optimization method used was to bring the concentration of a keyword on the page to a proper level and managing the Meta tags of the page.

Although these aspects are still quite significant, search engines now give a lot more priority to the popularity of a web page. The popularity of a web page is estimated based on how many inbound links it has from other web pages. This method is democratic in essence, where each link is like a vote for the specific web page. Therefore, SEO these days requires strategic work outside the site such as distributing free content in exchange of links to the site and establishing a presence on blogs and other interactive mediums online.

The most important thing to remember about SEO is that it is not static. The field is always changing and your strategies need to adapt to those changes. This is what makes utilizing the services of an expert SEO consultant so vital.

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