Search engine optimization is an attempt to get more and better quality visitors from search engines for a website without having to pay for it. Of course paying a search engine optimization expert to optimize your website for you, might in the end cost as much, if not more, than paying to have your website included in search results.
The concept can be traced back to the mid’90s and the early search engines like Alta Vista. During those early days one could indeed easily get your website to rank high in search results simply by adding the ‘right’ title tag, description tag and keywords to the HTML of the website. Content did not play a major role.
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.
Web developers responded by setting up link pages, link farms and paid links sites where you could buy as many incoming links to your website as you want. Many of those still exist today. The debasement of the system continued when many blogs and forums allowed website owners to link back to their own websites when they posted comments on one of these sites.
As a result many forums and blogs currently use the nofollow tag for links in the text of blog and forum entries. This tag should not normally have a negative effect on search rankings, it just won’t count to increase a website’s search ranking.
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.
Thanks to some key tips from the top search engines, a new marketing strategy search engine optimization has spread like wildfire. Online companies who need a little help boosting sales have turned to seo for help getting ahead. Find out more, now.
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