SEO (the acronym for Search Engine Optimization) is a method of optimizing your website in terms of where it appears on search engine results lists. Because so many businesses are prominent on the internet these days, SEO is an important part of being competitive in the market. There are many different methods used that fall under this umbrella.
Originally, search engines just used the information contained in your website. This included visible data such as things that people saw when they viewed your page, and also information contained in the coding that is not generally visible. However, people started to take advantage of this, and manipulated the information in and on their sites in order to get the highest ranking.
There is still a lot of this basic information used to categorize your website. However, it is supplemented by things that are harder to fake, such as links to your site from those of other businesses. People do still try to use various techniques that represent your site as something it is not in order to move up the rankings, but this can result in them being banned from search engines.
Any technique that moves your website up in the rankings artificially can be considered 'black hat' SEO. These techniques have gotten more sophisticated in recent years, but one of the first black hat methods of SEO was keyword stuffing. This evolved back when the number of times a word was mentioned on your site made a difference in the rankings. Some less than scrupulous individuals would use the word hundreds of times in order to move up.
Sites that represent themselves as something they are not are bad for search engines. Search engines make their living by returning reliable and reasonable results to users, and if they allow their searching protocols to be manipulated by black hat SEO, they will lose users. This has resulted in the widespread acceptance of banning websites which have been known to engage in these protocols.
Accepted methods of SEO include those that seek to make sure the site is represented when it is relevant. They include things like using variations of keyword phrases, linking to other websites that provide relevant information, goods, or services, and more. All of these improve your ranking in the results list, yet do not misrepresent your site.
Because certain things fall into a gray area, the search engines themselves usually offer guidelines on what is and isn't allowed. These pages have listings of banned methods and permitted methods, but they are also useful as a primer in the subject. People can use these informative pages to get started with SEO on the website.
Search engine optimization is essential to remaining competitive in the modern internet business age. Making sure that your website gets enough traffic is important to making plenty of sales, or getting plenty of people to view your ads. Like other advertising, it has trends and a competitive nature, so it is essential to keep up to date on all the most recent techniques.
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