Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Fundamental Concepts Of SEO

. Tuesday, October 13, 2009
By Ricky Lim

A search on any search engine for a well known keyword displays thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of results. In such a competitive situation, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a firm to feature among the top search results for a query relating to a particular word. The reason for the increasing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the presence of the website in top search results aids in attracting more visitors to it, which very often translates into more business.

There are two types of SEO - white hat and black hat. The tools applied in black hat SEO to push the website in the top results are not seen as fair practices. Whereas, white hat SEO works within the guidelines laid down by the search engines and concentrates on making use of widely accepted strategies.

The search engines in the past matched a webpage with the search for a given word by making use of Meta data, which is normally embedded in the code of a webpage. But, these days, a huge proportion of search engines have started using complicated algorithms which evaluate around two hundred different factors to rank search results.

SEO professionals have to be aware of all the new developments made by search engines and find out the relative weight of different factors in a search algorithm. Based on these findings, they enhance the SEO techniques used by their customers so that their websites remain competitive. Some time back, when the search engines depended upon Meta data and the text on the page, this process needed taking care of the Meta tags and ensuring a reasonable frequency with which a keyword appeared on the page.

Although these factors are crucial even today, the popularity of the web page is now more important for the search engines. The popularity of a web page is judged based on how many inbound links it has from other web pages. It is more like a democratic process as each link to the web page can be seen as a vote. Due to this significant change, SEO now also entails several offsite tactics like distributing free content to get embedded links, and creating an extended presence through blogs and other types of social media.

The most crucial thing to keep in mind about SEO is that it is quite dynamic. The field is constantly changing and your strategies have to adapt to those changes. That is the reason why it is so important to hire a seasoned SEO consultant to assist you.

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Seo Optimization Now

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