Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a method by which the volume and quality of traffic to a website is improved or enhanced through the use of search engines and their search results. The earlier a web site appears in a search result, the more visitors it receives from the engine.

Within the context of Internet advertising methods and strategies, SEO studies how search engines work and what people typically look for. Then, a website's content and HTML coding is revised in order to increase its relevance to specific keywords as well as to remove any barriers to search engine indexing.

SEO has been around since the early days of the web, though it wasn't called that then. Beginning in the 1990's as the first search engines were cataloguing the Web, webmasters (people responsible for designing, developing, marketing, of maintaining websites) and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines. At first, it was pretty basic. All a webmaster needed to do was submit a URL (web page address) to the various engines which would send a "spider" of "crawler" (a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a systematic, automated manner) to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involved a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, would then extract information about the page, which was then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

The actual term "search engine optimization" started to come into use soon after that. Web site owners were quick to catch on to the potential value of having their sites ranked more highly in search engine results, which created a business opportunity for various neophyte SEO practitioners.

Early versions of search algorithms (operational sequences) would rely on information supplied by webmasters such as Meta tags (HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page). However, these were found to be less than reliable since a webmasters choice of Meta tags or keywords wasn't always an accurate representation of a site's content and were also prone to webmaster manipulation in order to enable sites to rank higher in search engine results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords.

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin - who met as grad students at Stanford University - founded Google. Google was an outgrowth of work that both had been involved with preciously as students in developing "backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. Google rapidly became quite popular, owing to its ease of use and simple design which enabled it to evade many of the types of manipulation by webmasters that was common for search engines at that time.

Today, search engines use a wide variety of methods to reduce or eliminate most kinds of link manipulation. Google, for example, claims to rank sites using 200 different signals or criteria. However, neither they nor the other major search engines operation today disclose their algorithms and methodology for ranking pages to the general public.