What Is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization usually abbreviated as SEO is the process whereby the visibility of a web page or website in a search engine result can be manipulated. The higher ranked sites appear a lot in the search engine results thereby increasing the frequency of the online users visiting the website. Nowadays internet marketing is the best possible means of marketing with many companies and institutions putting up websites to facilitate their online presence. The rank or occurrence of the website in the search engine results page (called SERPS for short) thus matter a lot because that will increase their marketing coverage. SEO usually targets a broad array of search terms spanning from video searches, image searches, local searches and much more therefore incorporating everything in the internet. The high rise in number of websites has brought about a struggle in reaching the online market thus giving rise to SEO Engineers; these individuals usually try and affect the visibility or presence of websites in the search engine websites so as to create a comprehensive strategy that will ensure the site is seen by many people. In SEO both the online market and keywords or search terms are usually studied and then the website content is edited so as to increase the sites rating in the SERPS. Search engines on the other hand rank websites through indexing activities hence ensuring people gain access or are directed to the most prominent sites first, the search results are usually in descending order with respect to their ranking.

The SEO engineers or webmasters have come up with a variety of ways to increase their website dominance in the search results; they may at times increase the number on inbound links in the site so as to create a variety of searches point out to their pages. SEO began in the mid-1990s and back then all the webmasters did was submit web addresses to search engines which would then send a 'spider' to 'crawl' the website or webpage and extract the relevant information that would in turn be indexed. It was quite simple because the spider used to download page while the indexer on the other hand would extract all the relevant site information. When the site owners started seeing benefits of having a higher page ranking they began finding ways to improve their site ranking bringing about white hat and grey hat practitioners. White hat is acceptable measures taken to improve the site rating while grey hat is the unscrupulous ways by which a site rating can be enhanced some of those ways can be linking unrelated terms to the site thereby online users opening site opening websites that are not related to their searches. These attributes have made web search engines look for various means to curb grey hat since they may resort to use of other engines if they cannot get the exact they are seeking. A need for search accuracy is therefore need in order to make it preferential as compared to the other web search engines offering their services.

Early versions of search algorithm needed the websites index files and keywords to enforce a ranking of the websites and list them as part of the search lists. However this method was later found to be unreliable since the metadata could at times not be the actual site content, this proved to be discouraging to the visitor. These algorithms used site keyword density as part of their ranking criteria so as part of SEO the webmaster kinked many unrelated search terms to their web pages and websites. HTML of the sites was also altered so that the sites could ultimately rank well in SERPS. The search engines had to find a solution to stop this feebleness so they came up with changes in the algorithm that included additional factors that were much more complex and difficult for webmasters to manipulate. SEO may be a good way to increase site rating but the lengths at which webmasters have gone to so have ended up making the search engines seem incompetent. Incompetency can and will never be acceptable in the broad based internet marketing so the measures they took to curb grey hat were beneficial to both site owners who had good ratings through white hat and the search engines as well. There are a variety of search engines available but the most used search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, developed 'Backrub' which was a search engine that solely relied on mathematical algorithm to rank website and web pages. This was a much more efficient method of establishing a site prominence. The algorithm that was established checked the quantity and strength of inbound links on the website. Due to the accuracy of the page rank system link spamming was introduced this was establishing link farms whereby thousands of sites were created by the webmasters and SEO engineers. The leading web search engines as part of a protective mechanism opted not to disclose their algorithms so as to ensure ways are not found to alter site page ranking. Since 2005 Google has been analyzing user searches so that web searches can be personalized rather than the page ranking methods being used. This has been a great help to online users since one gets the exact content searched for rather than finding pages unrelated to ones search term. They set up a Nofollow attribute that stopped the effects that were earlier looming over page ranking. Besides Google other search engines have also put up ways to stop spamming of links and pages putting up unrelated search terms. As a result website found to be violating the web search engines may be removed or warned. The daily advancement in technology has however been a hindrance to the accuracy of these search engines since the SEO engineers have found that by using iframes, flash and javascript page rank sculpting can be performed. It is good to increase the site ranking but we should perform white hat if at all we want set up search engine optimization.