subject: Search Engine Optimization: What is SEO? [print this page] Search Engine Optimization: What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization: What is SEO?
Back in the day, as the web began to develop, webmasters began to appreciate the importance of search results. The whole point of building a website is to generate traffic; whether for the average blogger or for web-sales. If you do not appear in search results you're simply not a player in the game.
In a crowded Internet market, everyone wants to be at the very top of that list. itracking research shows that eighty per cent of users opt for the first three sites listed in a Google search. That is why it (literally) pays for Webmasters to optimize their websites for search engines.
There can be large sums of money involved and over the years SEO has been manipulated and abused for the purposes of generating spam and to redirect users to spurious sites and links.
The principle here is that is webmasters ensure that their sites are full of relevant content then, technically, their sites should do quite well in the search rankings as the sites will contain the very key words that users are applying to their searches.
When you search for a term in Google, for example, the (non-paid-for) search results are the result of SEO work: a Webmaster has worked to ensure that their site has been optimized to achieve high ranking results.
There is a high market-value to targeted search results and this has created conflict between webmasters and search-engines with webmasters attempting to manipulate their ranking in search results by stuffing web pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords all with the intention of improving ranking in search results.
As a result of this organic relationship between search engine optimizers and search engines, companies such as Google, Yahoo and Bing! are secretive about how their searches are performed. What we do know is that complex algorithms are used to compile and deliver the results and, furthermore, since 2005 Google has been offering personalised searches to users since 2005 for those logged in to the service.
