SEO

Webmasters and the content providers of the bygone era of mid-90’s began to optimize sites for the search engines as the search engines were cataloging the web when, in its nascent stages. All they did was to submit a site to engines that ran spiders to “crawl” the site and gather data. Then the search was made on the website for the search words found in the site and the results presented. Then, the sophistication came along.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is also known by many names in the internet circles but basically aims to improve the webpage rankings, which are most relevant to the keywords being searched according to the algorithm based on the search engine. The relevant pages are returned as results where the keywords and the ranking determine the order in which they are presented. To optimize a page, one needs to include the keyword phrase in question in the ad copy as well as appropriate places within the HTML code.

The bottom-line for genuine SEO professionals are basically marketers who have the target audience in mind along with that of the algorithms. This is the reason for the name behind the process. There was a time when it was believed that the density of the keyword did not matter much as a ranking factor among the SEO professionals but it has since changed now, with the keyword density being the present mantra of the SEO professionals. Keyword density is the number of times that a keyword makes an appearance per hundred words on a page.

To fine tune this even further to keep the pages both user as well as search engine friendly, SEO professionals suitable modify the internal link structure, navigation and the website architecture to suit the likes of the browsers as well as the search spiders. The search engines keep a list of the site’s data on their database. The search engines however have gotten smarter and look into the relationship between the linking and the linked site to determine if the content is relevant or not.

This will help the search engines eliminate artificial links to link to the same site thereby creating traffic for the site unnecessarily for an irrelevant search. The search engines keep evolving their algorithms to strike out bogus links that manipulate the algorithm to rank themselves on the search engine’s results page for a while. This is known as Organic or algorithmic SEO of websites. Search Engine Optimization takes time but given the fact that their results tend to get clicked more often in the search results, they are advantageous than the pay-per-click websites to drive marketing traffic.