Saturday, December 19, 2009

Fundamental Concepts Of SEO

By Carey Lim

Hundreds of thousands of results will appear before the user on searching for a well known keyword on any search engine. In this competitive situation, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a firm to feature among the top search results for a query relating to a particular word. Finding a place within the topmost results on related and important searches increases the number of people who are directed to your website and therefore you get more business. That is why SEO has become so significant.

Black hat and white hat are the two basic classifications of SEO techniques. The tools applied in black hat SEO to push the website in the top results are not seen as ethical. However, white hat SEO only applies those techniques which are approved of and do not go against the rules of the search engines.

The search engines in the past matched a webpage with the search for a particular word by using Meta data, which is usually included in the code of a webpage. However, these days most search engines use highly sophisticated algorithms, entailing the use of more than 200 different factors to come up with the results.

SEO consultants continuously try to guess the importance of different factors that play a part in the search algorithms and stay abreast with the advancements that search engines make. This information helps them fine-tune the SEO techniques for their customers so that they stay competitive for important keywords. When the search results were exclusively dependent on Meta data and the content of the web page, this task entailed optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and making sure that the keyword density of each page was just appropriate.

Although these factors are still quite important, 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. It is more like a democratic process as each link to the web page can be seen as a vote. Due to this significant change, SEO now also entails a lot of offsite strategies like giving away free content to get inbound links, and developing an extended presence through blogs and other forms of social media.

The most important thing to remember about SEO is that it is quite dynamic. The field is always changing and your strategies need to adjust to those changes. That is the reason why it is so critical to engage a seasoned SEO consultant to assist you.

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