Basics Of SEO

By Ricky Lim

A search on any search engine for a well known keyword displays thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of results. In this scenario, the methods which allow a company to appear in the first few results for a search using a particular word is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The reason for the increasing popularity of SEO in past few years is that the presence of the website in top search results helps in attracting more visitors to it, which very often converts into more business.

Black hat and white hat are the two primary categories of SEO techniques. Black hat SEO involves somewhat unaccepted ways to make a website appear at the top of the search rankings. However, white hat SEO only uses those techniques which are largely accepted and do not violate the principles of the search engines.

To connect a specific web page to a particular keyword, the search engines earlier utilised the Meta data of the page that has been included in the code of that page. However, key search engines now utilise intricate algorithms to show the results that are filtered on the basis of more than 200 distinct factors.

SEO experts have to keep track of all the latest developments made by search engines and guess the relative weight of each of the factors in a search algorithm. This knowledge aids them in updating the SEO strategies for their clients to enable them to appear in top results of popular keywords. When the search results were only dependent on Meta data and the content of the web page, this job involved optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and ensuring that the keyword density of every page was just right.

Although these factors are still quite important, search engines now give much more priority to the popularity of a web page. The number of links referring to a web page indicates the popularity of that web page. Each link is thus taken as a vote for the page and the algorithm becomes democratic in nature. Therefore, SEO these days requires strategic work outside the site such as distributing free content in exchange of links to the site and creating presence on blogs and other social mediums online.

The most crucial factor to keep in mind about SEO is that it is not static. This field keeps changing and your techniques should be adapted to the changes. That is the reason why it is so important to engage an experienced SEO consultant to assist you.

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