Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Basics Of SEO

By Sophie Lim

Any query of a popular phrase in a search engine would yield a large number of results. In this situation, the techniques which allow a company to appear in the first few results for a search using a particular word is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The reason for the growing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the appearance of the website in top search results helps in attracting more visitors to it, which very often translates into more business.

SEO can be categorized into black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Black hat means use of methods, which are mostly frowned upon, for making a site appear 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.

The search engines in the past matched a webpage with the search for a particular word by using Meta data, which is usually embedded in the code of a webpage. But, these days, most search engines have employed complicated algorithms which evaluate over two hundred different factors to rank search results.

SEO experts try to figure out the significance of many components in the search algorithms and keep in touch with the latest modifications that are brought about by different search engines. This knowledge helps them improve upon the SEO strategies for their customers so that they stay competitive for selected keywords. A few years back, when the search engines relied upon Meta data and the text on the page, this process needed taking care of the Meta tags and ensuring a reasonable density with which a keyword existed on the page.

Although these factors are critical even today, the popularity of the web page is now more significant as far as the search engines are concerned. The popularity of a particular web page is decided by how many other pages link to it. Every single link is thus seen as a vote for the page and the algorithm becomes democratic in essence. Because of this major change, SEO now also entails a lot of offsite strategies like giving away free content to get embedded links, and creating an extended presence through blogs and other forms of social media.

The crucial aspect of SEO to be always remembered is that it is not a one time task. SEO strategies are always trying to adapt to the changes happening in the sphere of online search. This is what makes utilizing the services of a professional SEO consultant so critical.

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