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Search Engine Optimization

Written by: Lou Sorell

Article Overview: Some history about Search Engine Optimization, what was used earlier and how it has evolved.

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.

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Article Tags: advertising methods, business opportunity, computer program, content providers, developing marketing, indexer, internet advertising, optimization seo, relevance, scheduler, search algorithms, search engine optimization, search engine results, search engine spider, search engines work, search result, sequences, term search engine, url web, web page address
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com



Related Forum Posts
What Do You Want To Be Taught? - Hi, My name is Jeff Foster, I will be moderating this new section. I want to get your opinion on topics you would like to discuss & be taught on. I see a great need for small business owners to learn how to perform basic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which would include the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you want to be taught on? Jeff
Re: Search Engine Optimization - If you are interested to get more information about Search Engine Optimization you can visit Search Engine Watch site gives you a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the search engine world. This site provides a ton of information about a very wide range of subjects related not only to search engine optimization, but also the flip side of the coin; subjects related to searching online.
Re: Can someone explain Search engine optimization to me? - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could be compared to a big popularity contest: A High School Computer Geek and a High School Football Captain who are trying to promote a party. The computer geek tells everyone in school & even hands out 100's of flyers about his party Friday night...what happens? his friends end up showing up and a few new people...even the new people leave right away because it is not what they are looking for. The High School Football Captain ends up just telling a few good buddies, and within hours the entire school not only knows about it, but everyone wants to come, and everyone does come & stay. One defenition of "optimize is "To make as perfect or effective as possibe." How effective are your article marketing campaigns? Could you be distributing content (that is what search engines index) more effectively? In a perfect world, who would you want promoting your website, web pages, and web content? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is determining this perfect & effective way to do this. Jeff
Re: How do I engage seo works to be done for my site? - I read "Search Engine Optimization" for dummies. Gave me a real good foundation on which to build my sites. Really helped a lot.
Re: How to Promote Your Business Online - Apart from using Search Engine Optimization or SEO for promoting websites, I also find Pay per Clicks (PPC) to be a very good way to do. Why? For me it doesn't open only one oppurtunity for you, in fact it opens 2! You can generate your awaited traffic even w/o saying stop, ready and go and gain a maximized profit too.


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