Search engine optimization (SEO), considered by many to be a subset of search engine marketing, is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Those efforts may also be seen in more narrow vertical search engines involving areas such as local search. Many site owners and consultants engaging in SEO attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site. The quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting further information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other specific action.
A typical Search Engine Results Page (SERP)In a broad sense, SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Creating web pages with SEO in mind does not necessarily mean creating content more favorable to algorithms than human visitors. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors.
The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees of site owners who may perform SEO services in-house.
Search engine optimizers often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective SEO can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.
The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization do not appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.
Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb[18] was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.
Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.[19] Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned.[20] Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.[21]
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google's, Yahoo!'s, MSN's and Ask.com's. Google has a Sitemaps program [22] to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program[23] and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals[24].
Getting into search engines' databases
Today's major search engines, by and large, do not require any extra effort to submit to, as they are capable of finding pages via links on other sites.
However, Google and Yahoo offer submission programs, such as Google Sitemaps, for which an XML type feed can be created and submitted. Generally, however, a simple link from a site already indexed will get the search engines to visit a new site and begin spidering its contents. It can take a few days or even weeks from the acquisition of a link from such a site for all the main search engine spiders to begin indexing a new site, and there is usually not much that can be done to speed up this process.
Once the search engine finds a new site, it uses a crawler program to retrieve and index the pages on the site. Pages can only be found when linked to with visible hyperlinks. However, some search engines, such as Google, are starting to read links created within Flash.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site, and many pages from a site may not be indexed by the search engines until they gain more PageRank, links or traffic. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled, as well as other importance metrics. Cho et al.[25] described some standards for those decisions as to which pages are visited and sent by a crawler to be included in a search engine's index.
A few search engines, such as Yahoo!, operate paid submission services that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or CPC. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but does not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.
Blocking robots
Main article: robots.txt
Webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots.
When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled.
Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches.
Classifications
SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Most professional SEO consultants do not offer spamming and spamdexing techniques amongst the services that they provide to clients. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who utilize them, as either "white hat SEO", or "black hat SEO".[26] Many SEO consultants reject the black and white hat dichotomy as a convenient but unfortunate and misleading over-simplification that makes the industry look bad as a whole. The comparison of white hat to black hat (spamdexing) methods is analogous to "positioning" compared to "guerilla marketing", with the latter spoiling the reputation of marketing as a whole.
Preferred "White hat" methods
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered "White hat" if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and/or involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines[27][28][29][30][31] are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White Hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then make that content easily accessible to their spiders, rather than game the system. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility[32], although the two are not identical.
Spamdexing "Black hat" methods
Main article: Spamdexing
"Black hat" SEO are methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from text that is "hidden", either as text colored similar to the background or in an invisible or left of visible div, or by redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. A method that sends a user to a page that was different from the page the search engined ranked is Black hat as a rule. One well known example is Cloaking, the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual review of a site.
One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.[33]. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list. [3] [4]
SEO and marketing
There is a considerable sized body of practitioners of SEO who see search engines as just another visitor to a site, and try to make the site as accessible to those visitors as to any other who would come to the pages. They often see the white hat/black hat dichotomy mentioned above as a false dilemma. The focus of their work is not primarily to rank the highest for certain terms in search engines, but rather to help site owners fulfill the business objectives of their sites. Indeed, ranking well for a few terms among the many possibilities does not guarantee more sales. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search results to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and making sites accessible and usable.
SEOs may work in-house for an organization, or as consultants, and search engine optimization may be only part of their daily functions. Often their education of how search engines function comes from interacting and discussing the topics on forums, through blogs, at popular conferences and seminars, and by experimentation on their own sites. There are few college courses that cover online marketing from an ecommerce perspective that can keep up with the changes that the web sees on a daily basis.
SEO, as a marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However, as the search engines are not paid for the traffic they send from organic search, the algorithms used can and do change, there are no guarantees of success, either in the short or long term. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, SEO is often compared to traditional Public Relations (PR), with PPC advertising closer to traditional advertising. Increased visitors is analogous to increased foot traffic in retail advertising. Increased traffic may be detrimental to success if the site is not prepared to handle the traffic or visitors are generally dissatisfied with what they find. In either case increased traffic does not guarantee increased sales or success.
While endeavoring to meet the guidelines posted by search engines can help build a solid foundation for success on the web, such efforts are only a start. SEO is potentially more effective when combined with a larger marketing campaign strategy. Despite SEO potential to respond to the latest changes in market trends, SEO alone is reactively following market trends instead of pro-actively leading market trends. Many see search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under which search engine optimization fits, but it's possible that many who focused primarily on SEO in the past are incorporating more and more marketing ideas into their efforts, including public relations strategy and implementation, online display media buying, web site transition SEO, web trends data analysis, HTML E-mail campaigns, and business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.
In addition, whilst SEO can be considered a marketing tactic unto itself, it's often considered (in the view of industry experts) to be a single part of a greater whole.[citation needed] Marketing through other methods, such as viral, pay-per-click, new media marketing and other related means is by no means irrelevant, and indeed, can be crucial to maintaining a strong search engine rank.[citation needed] The part of SEO that simply insures content relevancy and attracts inbound link activity may be enhanced through broad target marketing methods such as print, broadcast and out-of-home advertising as well.
SEO and Social Media Optimization (SMO)
With the rise of social media and networking was a whole new form of marketing created as a side effect of that, called social media optimization (SMO) or "social media marketing" (SMM). SMO gets often confused with SEO.
SMO is related to SEO, but are not the same. A different skill set is needed for SEO than it is for SMO. SMO is more related to Buzz Marketing or Word of mouth marketing, with some positive SEO side-effects.