Definition of Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to improving visibility of a website so that it can be highly ranked by search engines. The most popular search engines are Google and Yahoo which provide free search results. Other search engines are paid for listings. Sites which are placed first in search results have more chance of being viewed by many visitors. This is also true for sites that appear more frequently in search results. The kinds of search that a visitor may be looking for include: video search, image search, information search, local search, and industry specific search.
Search Engine Optimizers
Consultants who carry out internet research on behalf of their clients or employees whose duty is to perform SEO services are referred to as Search Engine Optimizers. They may offer specific services or be part of a wide marketing scheme. Effective SEO requires changes to the HTML source code of the site and content. SEO may therefore require knowledge in HTML and website development and design. An optimized site will have search engine friendly features including shopping carts, content management systems, menus, videos, images, and other elements that have been optimized for purposes of being responsive to search engines.
SEO depends on how search engines work and how users find what they are looking for. Visitors require results that are specific to the information being sought. They provide a short description of what they are looking for. The user gives the short description in the form of keywords. Search results contain links to pages which contain the user’s keywords. Successful SEO involves designing or editing the contents of the website to incorporate features that make it responsive to the search engines and/or remove those that create barriers to search engines. The visitor may also require increased number of back-links and inbound links.
File Names
Web pages should be relevant and really descriptive of the information for the SE to interpret the information. Keywords should be well chosen. Each page should be focused on a particular key word. This key word should appear in H1 tag and also in the file name. Black hat SEO also known as spamdexing refers to degrading relevant search results and user experience search engines. This is done by using tools such as link-farms, keyword-stuffing and article spinning.
How SEO Started
SEO was started in the mid 1990’s. The first technique used was referred to as cataloguing the early web. Webmasters submitted the address of a page, usually referred to as URL, to several engines. The engines would in turn send a spider to crawl the page, extract links to other pages from it and index the information on the page. The spider first downloads the page and saves it on the search engines server. The indexer extracts information about the page and saves them into a scheduler for crawling. The information extracted from the page included words, where they are located, weights for specific words and links on the page.
