DM University: SEO
SEO Definition
Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO refers to the changes made to a webpage to improve upon its ranking or positioning in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of one or more search engines for a particular keyword(s).
The term also refers to an industry of consultants that perform optimization tasks on behalf of clients’ sites.
SEO may involve changes in design or layout, link building, and new text for meta-tags and website content. Advertisers enjoy higher rankings in search engines, as it typically results in more free traffic directed to their sites, which may ultimately help the advertiser generate more revenue.
Background Info
Back in the mid-90s, getting your webpage listed in the SERPs was a matter of simply submitting your site to various search engines who would then send spiders out to crawl the site, store the collected data, and then display results on the basis of all the pages they had spidered. As the web continued its exponential growth, search engines realized in order to provide value to their users, it was necessary to sort through the sea of spidered pages and display webpages in terms of their degree of relevancy to the searched keyword(s). And so began the game of tug-of-war between search engines and SEO that still continues to this very day.
At the outset, search engines were guided by the webmasters, relying on webmaster-provided information such as meta-tags. Meta-tags offered search engines a guide to each page’s content and relevant keywords. Earlier search engines also relied heavily on several “on-site” factors such as keyword(s) in the domain name and in the site’s directory and file name, page titles and tags, ratio of keyword(s) to other words on the page, etc. It was only a matter of time before webmasters and SEOs started to abuse this system to optimize their pages to improve their webpage’s rankings. This forced search engines to develop more complex algorithms that took into account a wider range of factors to ensure their SERPs were displaying the most relevant pages, as opposed to the optimized pages.
In the midst of this ongoing battle between search engines and SEOs, a new search engine by the name of Google emerged. Google via PageRank, which what was at the time its mainstay algorithm, revolutionized search bringing to the table a new concept to analyzing a webpage’s relevance. PageRank perceives incoming links to a webpage as a vote of confidence for the page’s relevance. In other words, the more webpages that linked to a particular webpage, the more relevant that page was. Furthermore, the value of each incoming link itself varied directly based on the PageRank of the page it was coming from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page. Since PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google’s SERPs were far less vulnerable to manipulation and thus able to display more relevant results. Google soon became the most popular and successful search engine.
However, the war was far from over. Once acquainted with the inner workings of PageRank, webmasters focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links in bulk, as they aimed to harvest links solely to influence Google into advancing their ranking on its SERPs. Google, in addition to other search engines countered by working on more intelligent or advanced algorithms
Today, the battle between search engines and SEOs still wages on. Search engines have come a long way from their initial, simplified methods and ranking algorithms. Most search engines now use incredibly complex algorithms that include a wide range of on site and off site factors including keywords in the domain name, age and uniqueness of content, incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks, and even metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page. Purportedly, most search engines use hundreds of factors like these in their ranking algorithms and methodologies, even continually altering the weight each of the factors carry, as to keep the competition and webmasters guessing. While SEO consultants and webmasters deserve credit for their relentlessness, most if not all current SEO thinking on what works and what doesn’t is largely based on informed guesses and speculation.
External Links
Guidelines for webmasters
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO
