Search Engine Optimization: What is SEO and how can we use it?
Search Engine Optimization: What is SEO and how can we use it
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In the early days of the internet Webmasters were quick to see the benefits of coming top in the search results. The whole reason for building a website is to create traffic to it and this can be said to be the same for blogging and for web sales. If you want to be respected and you want to be at the top of your game you have to be top of the search results.
The internet is a crowded market place and therein lies an endless line of Webmasters hungry for top-listings in search results. And for good reason: itracking research tells us that eighty percent of we-users visit the top three results in Google search results. It literally pays to fall in the top of these search results and Webmasters know it.
Because of the large financial rewards involved in the business, SEO has been exploited and misused to create traffic and pull web-users to bogus sites and links all to achieve a profit.
With such high rewards it is no surprise that an adversarial relationship has developed between the search-engines and the Webmasters that strive to manipulate their rankings in the results by cramming key-words into their sites or flooding their sites with repeated words that are likely to match search-terms, all of course, with the aim of staying at the top of the results.
If Webmasters make sure that their sites are stuffed with pertinent content then, in theory, their websites should appear high in the search rankings because their content should neatly match the hey terms that searchers are using.
We see the result of SEO work every day. When you conduct a simple Google search you will see that the (non-profit) links are all the result of SEO work to assist you in finding what you have searched for. The work that you see is the efforts of the Webmaster to optimize their site for the search engines.
Search engines (such as Bing, Yahoo and Google) have remained quiet about the secrets behind the algorithms that power their searched and this is all because of the curious relationship that has sprung-up between the Webmasters and the search engines. But the search engines are always moving forward within the industry and these elaborate algorithms are constantly evolving. Since 2005, for example, Google has been delivering personalized search results for those logged into their service.