Search Engine Optimization – Good And Bad Practices
What is search engine optimization? This simply refers to tweaks made to the content, layout and HTML of web page to try and influence it’s ranking in the search results of one or more search engines. A whole industry of ‘experts’ has developed that offers this service at sometimes very high hourly rates.
The whole concept dates back to the early days of the Internet and search engines. During the good old days of search engines like Alta Vista, it was in fact quite easy to get your website ranked high in search results. All you had to do was ‘feed’ it with the right meta tags. The right keywords, description tag and title tag had a major influence on how high your website was ranked. In those days you could build a website today and have it ranked high in Alta Vista tomorrow.
Search engines soon realized that the mere concept of a website owner being able to manipulate the ranking of his own website in search results meant bad business. They therefore introduced new formulas to rank websites in search results. Often they kept these formulas, or algorithms secret.
Inktomi was one of the first search engines that developed a system to use the number of incoming links to a website to determine it’s search ranking. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin established Google in’98 they incorporated a patented PageRank system in which not only the number of links but also the quality of those links were used to determine a website’s search ranking.
The result was that webmasters started setting up links sites, link farms and link exchanges to artificially increase the number of websites linking to their site. Soon you could simply buy as many links as you wanted. You could also inflate your link count by posting on blogs and forums – very often totally unrelated to what your own website was about.
This resulted in the development of the nofollow tag. This tag instructs search engine robots not to count such a link in favor of a website when encountered. Theoretically at least it should also not penalize the website linked to. Many forums and blogs now use this tag in links on their pages.
Google, although never making public exactly how they rank search results, have since set up an extensive set of guidelines to help webmasters to get a better search engine ranking by focusing on the things that should really count: quality and relevance of content, quality of design and good HTML coding.
Search engine optimization has therefore moved beyond buying links and trying to manipulate a few HTML tags. The focus has shifted to quality and relevance, where it should have been from the start.
After top search engines divulged some information a new marketing strategy search engine optimization has spread like wildfire. Businesses who want to get themselves noticed have turned to seo for help getting ahead. Find out more, now.
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