S.E.O

Search Engine Optimization

24.09.2007. 11:49

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to "search engine optimizers," an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites. Some commentators, and even some SEOs, break down methods used by practitioners into categories such as "white hat SEO" (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or "black hat SEO" (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters say that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant. Other SEOs reject the black and white hat dichotomy as over-simplification.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies may increase both the number and quality of visitors. Search engine optimization is sometimes offered as a stand-alone service, or as a part of a larger marketing effort, and can often be very effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site.

For competitive, high-volume search terms, the cost of pay per click advertising can be substantial. Ranking well in the organic search results can provide the same targeted traffic at a potentially significant savings. Site owners may choose to optimize their sites for organic search, if the cost of optimization is less than the cost of advertising.

Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites seek any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrases. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM revenue model. In contrast, many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate readiness to buy. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, resulting in more sales. Search engine optimization can be very effective when used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy.

The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don't appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.

Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.

Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.[6] Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned.[7] Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.[8].

Google has enforced webpage restrictions for years, such as for hidden-text (background and foreground colors the same hue); in 2006, Google could punish a non-standard website by blocking search-results, automatically, the next day for 30-35 days (or longer), pending a reinclusion request, and if reinstated, revert the index to old/expired/deleted webpages from a year earlier, delaying the re-indexing of the current website for a total of 2-4 months.

Yahoo! and MSN Search do not automatically punish entire websites for small amounts of hidden text.[citation needed] Google's market share of daily searches has fallen rapidly from 75% to 56% over the past few years, as other search engines find many webpages that Google has banned and cannot display due to Google's severely limited index.[citation needed] In early 2006, MSN Search typically re-indexed small websites every 14 days, and Yahoo! also re-indexed quickly, much faster than Google, but all three MSN/Yahoo!/Google could require more than a month to index a new page (new file name) on an old website.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google's, Yahoo!'s, MSN's and Ask.com's. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has SiteExplorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals.

New sites do not need to be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. However, Google and Yahoo offer a submission program such as Google Sitemaps that an XML type feed could be created and submitted. Generally however, a simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days or even weeks from the acquisition of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

Once the search engine finds a new site, it uses a crawler program to retrieve and index the pages on the site. Pages can only be found when linked to with visible hyperlinks. For instance, some search engines do not read links created by Flash or Javascript.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site, and many pages from a site may not be indexed by the search engines until they gain more pagerank or links or traffic. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled, as well as other importance metrics. Cho et al. (Cho et al., 1998) [9] described some standards for those decisions as to which pages are visited and sent by a crawler to be included in a search engine's index.

Webmasters can instruct spiders not to index certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Standard practice requires a search engine to check this file upon visiting the domain, though a search engine crawler will keep a cached copy of this file as it visits the pages of a site, and may not update that copy as quickly as a webmaster does. The web developer can use this feature to prevent pages such as shopping carts or other dynamic, user-specific content from appearing in search engine results, as well as keeping spiders from endless loops and other spider traps.

For those search engines who have their own paid submission (like Yahoo!), it may save some time to pay a nominal fee for submission. Yahoo!'s paid submission program guarantees inclusion in their search results, but does not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Technorati Profile

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