What is SEO?

What do you do when you want to search for information online? Type keywords on a famous search engine (perhaps google, yahoo or msn), click the search button and click on a link on the first page of the search results. Imagine yourself as a website owner and you simply want to improve the traffic of your webpage. It will be ideal to have your URL appearing on the very first page of search results, of course depending on the relevant keywords typed. Heard it or not, Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of manners meant to improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. Simple terms, the higher the ranking, the more likely the website will appear in the first page of the search results, the more likely an internet user will click on the URL and hence traffic.

Search engines use a formula, algorithm (for computing) to influence how a site will rank in the results that internet users will see. A range of steps and techniques can be used to gain a high ranking for a particular site. The methods are broken down into two categories, namely “white hat SEO” and “black hat SEO” The colours speak for themselves, basically, “white hat SEO” includes methods like building content and the quality of the site, more to the legal sense. “Black hat SEO” involves tricks such as spamdexing or even cloaking. Many would see black hat methods are an unwarranted, deceptive way to manipulate the rankings of one’s site. Furthermore, they do not provide more quality content to site users. More often than not search engines condemn these ‘illegal-like’ approaches. It all comes down to how concerned a webmaster is towards ethical values and principles.

For the record, search engine optimization did not come into existence until the year 1997; less than a decade after search engines are born. The early aggressive webmasters quickly took advantage, making efforts to earn good rankings for their websites. With the increase of SEO, there is a possibility of consequential destructive relationship between Search engines and SEOs, an annual conference named ‘AIRWEB’ was created in 2005 to discuss bridging the web and diminish chances of damaging effects of aggressive web content providers. Some SEO techniques are seen as illegal whereby their client’s websites are prohibited from search engines.

With a good traffic chained from good SEO, marketing online becomes crucial. Simply put it, more online traffic, more eyes will feast on the websites contents, a big smile on the webmaster’s face. For example, a website selling items can have a very good chance of earning customers with more traffic; simple probability theory can explain this. Even so, higher rankings do not guarantee more sales but many are more than willing to pay sky high prices for professional SEO companies just to improve their site’s traffic.