Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the method of strengthening the profile of an internet site or page in search engines via “organic” or “algorithmic” (otherwise known as “ordinary” or non-chargeable) search results. There are other types of marketing (SEM) which specifically aim at paid listings. Generally, the more often a site shows up in the search results list, and the higher up the listings is does so, the more enquiries it is likely to receive from the people accessing the search engine. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may target different types of search, including news, image, video, maps and also industry specific search engines. This helps to give a website authority.
As a marketing plan, Search Engine Optimization looks at how search engines actually work, what people type in to the search engines, the words that they use (Key Words) and what the favoured search engine of the intentioned market consumer is. In order to optimize a website it may be necessary to edit its content and programming, to both remove blocks to the indexing actions of search engines and increase its relevance to precise key words. Increasing the number of “back links” or “in-bound” links, is another method often adopted by “SEO”s
The ellipsis “SEOs” is used to refer to “Search Engine Optimizers”. It’s a phrase that has been taken by industry people carrying out optimization assignments for clients, and by employees who perform search engine optimization in-house. SEO can be presented as part of a broad sales and marketing campaign, or as a more specific, stand-alone service. Search engine optimization techniques are often built into the basic design and development of a website, since, in order to be effective, SEO may need changes to the HTML code of a website and its content. The phrase “search engine friendly” is often coined, to describe web site designs, menu, CMS, image, video, shopping carts, and other rudimentals that have been “optimised” to increase search-engine exposure.
Spamdexing (also termed as Black-Hat SEO) uses techniques like link-farming and article “spinning”. This depreciates the value and relevance of search results. Search engines, such as Google, searches for websites that use these methods with a view to taking them off their listings.
It was in the middle of the 1990’s that web-designers began “optimising” websites, just as the first search engines were beginning to list the early “web”. Back then, all they needed to do was input the web-address or URL of a page to the search engine, which would send a “spider” to the site, take out links to other pagers from it, and return the information back to be indexed. Basically, the SE Spider would download a page and store it on the search engine’s server, where a 2nd programme, called an indexer, would take out lots of information about that page. Information such as key words, position on the page, weight for certain words and any links that may be contained too. These were then placed into a scheduler for “crawling” by the spider, at a later date.
It wasn’t long before website owners began to realize the value of having highly ranked sites, prominent in search engine results. This in turn created opportunities for both white hat and black hat SEOs. The earliest documented use of the phrase “Search Engine Optimisation” was in August 1997, on a web page from the MultimediaMarketingGroup.
Early search engine algorithms needed key word Meta tags, or index files in engines such as ALIWEB. Meta description tags describe, in some way, the webpage’s content. However, using meta data tended to be quite unreliable, because the webmaster’s choice of keywords could inacurrately represent the content of the website. Inconsistent information often meant that pages ranked for irrelevant searches. Website programmers also influenced certain attributes within the HTML details of the page in an effort to improve their rankings in the search engines.
As a result of heavy reliance on keywords, over which the first search engines had no control, they suffered from abuse and rank manipulation. And so, in order to provide more accurate results for their consumers, they had to adapt, and did so by showing the “most relevant” results first, rather than those pages which were simply just “stuffed” with lots of key words. This made sense, since the success of any search engine relies mainly on being able to produce the most relevant results, with the least amount of red-herrings. If the results aren’t relevant, users would simply use a different search engine to obtain the information required. So they developed more complex ranking-algorithms, taking into account other influences which were more difficult to manipulate by webdesigners.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, of Stanford University, developed a search engine called “backrub”, which rated the reputation of web-pages using a mathematical algorithm. The number or Page Rank is a function of both the quantity and strength of inbound links. Page Rank works out how likely it is that a page will be found by a random web-surfer, following the links from one page to another. In other words, some links are stronger than others, since a page with a higher PageRank is more likely to be reached by the afore-mentioned surfer.
Google was founded in 1988, by Larry and Serge. It soon drew a loyal following amongst users, because of its simple design. PageRank, hyperlink analysis, key word occurrence, links, meta tags and other factors were used to allow Google to avoid the sort of abuse seen in engines that didn’t use the off-page factors (PageRank and hyperlink analysis) for their rankings. Although more difficult to toy with, web designers had already created systems to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these also worked on PageRank. Many focused on buying and selling links on a huge level. Some of these “link-farms” created hundreds and hundreds of websites for link-spamming. By 2004 there were many private factors built into the algorithms in an effort to combat link-manipulation. Google says it now employs over 200 different “signals” to rank its sites. None of the major search engines have revealed the algorithms they adopt, though many SEO practitioners have studied the patents held by the search engines to gain some sort of knowledge into the algorithms.
Google began to personalize the results for each user, based on their previous search history, in 2005. In 2008, Bruce Clay declared “ranking is dead” because of the personalized search, because its rank would be completely different for each user and each search.
In 2007 Google started a campaign against paid-links which effectively transfer PageRank. In 2009 they announced measures to reduce the effects of Page Rank manipulation, or sculpting, using a no-follow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a software developer at Google, declared that Google Bot would now disregard no-follow links, in an effort to stop SEO consultants from using no-follow links to sculpt PageRank. To avoid the evaporation of PageRank, SEO engineers developed different techniques that substituted no-follow tags with complicated JavaScript, so allowing PageRank sculpting. Additionally solutions have been put forward, including iframes, Flash and JavaScript.
At Christmas 2009, Google declared that the web-search history of ALL its users would be used in order to settle search results. Real-time search was also introduced in late 2009 in order to make results better timed and appropriate. In the past, it has taken months and years to increase search rankings. With the huge increase in use of social media websites the major search engines have made improvements to the algorithms allowing new and unsullied content to rank rapidly in any search grading.
