Search Engine Optimization

Is the process of improving a web site's ranking in a search engine with respect to specific search terms. The process begins with understanding the current methods used to rank pages. While the precise formulas closely guarded the observed variables are usually published. For example Google claims to use about 200 such factors.

SEO is one of the most common tools for web site promotion. It should form a part of a marketing strategy. However, considering the capricious change in ranking algorithms, it is risky to use SEO as the dominant source of web sites traffic. A mix of other traffic sources such as Affiliate Network; Web Advertising and an offline marketing strategy can produce a more steady result.

Internal Techniques

Also called on page techniques focus on altering the contents, media and layout used in a web page or web site. Examples of internal factors are: Title text; meta-data data; anchor text; heading text; text size; distance of words from the beginning of the file. Factors that are considered cheating and can penalize the owner are small or hidden text.

External Techniques

External SEO techniques also called off page techniques use factors outside the web page or beyond the web site being optimized. The idea comes from Google's Page Rank algorithm which defines page rank by crunching the number of incoming links factored by their popularity. This means that page rank can flow from one site to another. External techniques are based on creating many external pages with intermediate page rank and pointing these to the site one wishes to optimize. If sufficiently powerful Link Farms are created they will obscure the useful results in the search engine.

Black/White/Grey Hat Techniques

Some of the more aggressive SEO Techniques have side effects. They can introduce many irrelevant pages into the search engine's index. They can may even place pages into top ranks of unrelated search. Since such practices undermine the quality of service provides a search engine, the operator will take measures to discourage these. Measures range from permanent removal from the index through reduction in rank and reduce spidering frequency.

Risk based classification of SEO techniques.

White Hat Techniques are considered legitimate methods of improving a site's ranking. They assist the search engine to index a web site's content. Two examples of white hat technique are the removal of duplicate content and the introduction of accurate metadata.

Black hat techniques considered unfair practices which once detected will blacklist a domain and can carry penalties. One example of black hat technique is called Cloaking. This is done by instructing a server to issue a modified page whenever it identifies a request from a spider. These pages shown only to the spiders were radically different from what the users see and lead to irrelevant search results. 

Page ranking formulas change overtime reflect obsolescence of ranking features due to optimization and a shift to other philosophies of ranking pages.

See Also

Unrelated Keywords | Redirects | Keyword Stuffing | Duplicate Content | Tiny Text | Hidden Text | Doorway Pages | Link Farm | Cloaking | Keyword Stacking | Gibberish | Domain Spam | Hidden links | Micro Sites | Page Swapping | Typo Spam | Cybersquatting | Page Rank

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