W3 Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or “SEO” for short, is a process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (organic) search results.   Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This is what gives a web site it’s web presence.

Search Engine Optimization considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design.   The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Internet.   Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider (a special program that records web pages)  to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

The process involves 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, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase search engine optimization probably came into use in 1997.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files.  Meta tags provide a guide to each page’s content.  But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches.

Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation.   To provide better results to their users, search engines had to change in order to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters.

Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation.  Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.

The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages.  Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.  SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

By 1997 search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords.  Early search engines, like Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating their rankings.

Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs.  In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. 

In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.  Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.  Google’s Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, 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. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization.  W3SearchEngineOptimization.com is one of those companies that enjoys a very close relationship with the search engines.

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results.  Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically.  S

ome search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.  Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.

Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren’t discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve.

The search engine’s attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing.  Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.

 White hats (like w3SearchEngineOptimization.com) tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception.   As the search engine guidelines 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 making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.  White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.  One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

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 site review.

Infamous examples are the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices,  and the April 2006 removal of the PPC Agency BigMouthMedia.  All three companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

Search Engine Optimization techniques will generate a return on investment.  However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.  Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.  

Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market.  The search engines’ market shares vary from market to market, as does competition.  In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.  In markets outside the United States, Google’s share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of  2008.

As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine.  In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player.  The most notable markets where this is the case are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Czech republic where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language

Be sure your site uses white hat SEO techniques from W3SearchEngineOptimization.com on a permanent, ongoing basis so that your web site will continue to appear one apge one for search results of your key words.