Basics Of SEO

by Carey Lim | 13th October 2009

Any query of a popular word in a search engine would result in a huge number of results. In such a scenario, how a website gets itself among the topmost results of a search for a particular keyword is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Getting to the top of a web search means more traffic for your website, leading to more business, and that is why SEO has gained such popularity in the last few years.

Black hat and white hat are the two basic categories of SEO techniques. The methods used in black hat SEO for ensuring a place for the website in the top results are not seen as fair practices. On the other hand, white hat SEO works within the guidelines laid down by the search engines and focuses on making use of widely accepted strategies.

With the purpose to comprehend the relevance of a web page for a specific keyword, search engines traditionally used the page's Meta data, which is inserted into the code of the page by website managers or developers. But, nowadays, a huge proportion of search engines have employed complicated algorithms which evaluate around two hundred different factors to rank search results.

SEO experts have to be aware of all the new developments made by search engines and guess the relative weight of each of the factors in a search algorithm. This knowledge helps them improve upon the SEO techniques for their customers so that they stay competitive for selected keywords. For the older algorithms, which used just the Meta data and web site content, the optimization technique used was to bring the concentration of a keyword on the page to a proper level and dealing with the Meta tags of the page.

Despite the continued importance of the onsite factors, the search engines now put much more stress on how popular a page is. The popularity of a web page is judged based on how many inbound links it has from other web pages. It is almost like a democratic process as each link to the web page can be seen as a vote. Because of this, now SEO has to concentrate on offsite techniques too, such as offering content for free to get inbound links and establishing a presence on online mediums for social interaction, such as blogs, forums etc.

The most crucial thing to remember about SEO is that it is quite dynamic. This field keeps changing and your methods should be up to date with the changes. This is what makes using the services of a professional SEO consultant so vital.

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