What is search engine optimization? This simply refers to tweaks made to the content, layout and HTML of web page to try and influence it’s ranking in the search results of one or more search engines. A whole industry of ‘experts’ has developed that offers this service at sometimes very high hourly rates.
The whole concept dates back to the early days of the Internet and search engines. During the good old days of search engines like Alta Vista, it was in fact quite easy to get your website ranked high in search results. All you had to do was ‘feed’ it with the right meta tags. The right keywords, description tag and title tag had a major influence on how high your website was ranked. In those days you could build a website today and have it ranked high in Alta Vista tomorrow.
Those days are long gone. Search engines quickly caught on that their search results were being manipulated by web designers and they changed the algorithm (formula) they used to determine a page’s ranking.
Theoretically the number of other websites linking to a particular website should be an indication of its importance. Inktomi is an example of one of the early search engines that used this principle to rank websites. Google soon after developed their own patented system whereby they didn’t only count incoming links to a website, but also rated those links in terms of various factors - so not all links were equal.
The result was that webmasters started setting up links sites, link farms and link exchanges to artificially increase the number of websites linking to their site. Soon you could simply buy as many links as you wanted. You could also inflate your link count by posting on blogs and forums - very often totally unrelated to what your own website was about.
Subsequently many blog sites and forums started introducing the nofollow tag to instruct search engine spiders not to let such a link count in favor of a particular website. This tag should not have a negative effect on the page linked to either - it should simply be neutral.
Google has since published an extensive manual where it explains to webmasters what they should be looking at if they want a good ranking in Google’s search results. Topics covered are guidelines for design and content, technical guidelines and quality guidelines that if followed will ensure a positive effect on your website’s ranking.
A real search engine optimization professional would concentrate on improving his customer’s website in terms of quality and relevance rather than advise him or her to spend money on buying incoming links, or have numerous computer generated content pages that mean nothing to a human visitor.
When top search engines released their key criteria a new craze called search engine optimization has struck the internet. Online companies who need a little help boosting sales have turned to seo for help getting ahead. Find out more, now.
