Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. In simple terms, SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for relevant words and phrases
Importance of SEO
JupiterResearch has discovered that the typical organization gets about 80 percent of its commercial search engine referrals from organic results and the rest from PPC ads. The research also showed that 90% percent of searchers only visit sites inside first 10 results. This trend is only accentuating with time, as people get used to the top results being suitable, and acceptable to answer their query.
The art and science of SEO
SEO is part art and part science. SEO employs a variety of techniques to ensure that a site will be found by a search engine, such as manipulation of a search engine’s indexing mechanism, cross linking between websites, or the editing of a site’s content to include and/or repeat keywords relevant to a wide variety of search queries.
SEO is the art of attracting more traffic, and therefore more business to your website; doing so by moving it as far as possible up the search engine results page (SERP) as possible. It is an art because there is no certainty involved in the results and it depends on many creative factors such as keyword usage, tailoring on-page content, arrangement of site content, meta tagging, linkage to other sites and various factors determined by the search engines.
SEO is additionally a science and is accomplished by optimizing certain sections or “elements” in the HTML coding of every page. You are able to calculate factors such as keyword density within the page copywriting & meta tags, optimizing html codes as well as various factors such as anchor text, and website linkage density.
What is the relationship between SEO and the search engines?
Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly appropriate results to users. Search engines like Google “spider” your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much like a human would click on the links of your pages. Search engines use intricate, secret and ever-changing mathematical algorithms to rank sites. The search engine spiders look at links from other websites as approval votes, just as a newspaper review might inspire readers to eat at a restaurant.
Notable SEO consultants
Notable SEOs, for example Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different techniques to search engine optimization, and have published their research in online forums and blogs. SEO practitioners fall into 2 main groups - White Hat and Black Hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may ultimately be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways which are disapproved of by the various search engines, or involve deception.
To learn how to get your website ranked on the 1st page of the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), visit AdVantage SEO. Information covering search engine optimization, PPC advertising, web design, and social media marketing.
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