Saturday, August 1, 2009

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

By Virginia Anthony

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an internet marketing strategy which aims to improve the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Through search engine optimization, a website's ranking is improved and so more visitors it will be generated to the website. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Optimizing a website principally involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevancy to specific keywords and to get rid of barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be employed to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Search engine optimization commenced in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. At first, all a webmaster needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send out a spider to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

Site proprietors started to acknowledge the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results. Early adaptations of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided info such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines. Meta tags allow for a guide to each page's content.

Because the success and popularity of a search engine is ensured by its ability to produce the most crucial results to any given search, allowing those results to be fake would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines reacted by developing more elaborate ranking algorithms, providing additional factors that were harder for webmasters to alter.

By 2007, search engines had merged a wide range of unrevealed factors in their ranking algorithms to cut down the impact of link manipulation. SEO practitioners may also analyze patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

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