Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the craft of optimizing a website for search engines like Google or Yahoo. SEO aims to make pages be better indexed, higher ranked, and potentially, look more clickable in results than their non-optimized counterparts.

Roughly speaking search engine optimization ranges from black-hat to white-hat techniques, with a lot of often controversial gray-hat area in-between. A black-hat search engine optimization technique for instance is hiding keywords by using a white font on a white background. Search engines like Google penalize such techniques -- if they find them, which isn't always the case -- and provide guidelines of their own on what they deem appropriate. Another black-hat technique is cloaking, which consists of sending other content to the Googlebot or other search engine crawlers than one sends to human visitors. Google's guidelines on this wrap it up as "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines."

White-hat techniques on the other hand, for instance, improve the hierarchical navigation structure of a website, provide unique fitting titles to pages, and remove accessibility issues... issues like creating content which can only be seen with JavaScript-enabled in the browser. Often, generally aiming for accessibility almost automatically brings improvements in SEO (which makes the term SEO itself a bit of a misnomer for these cases).

Next to the technical modification of one's website, the so-called on-page optimization, there's also the (arguably more powerful, at least in this day and age) so-called off-page optimization. The latter deals mainly with attracting backlinks from other websites, which is the source of a good ranking. One of the best tricks for doing so isn't much of a "trick" at all: it consists of providing good, authoritative or entertaining content on a specific subject. If you do offer this, and make sure to send out a pointer to parties who you think may be interested in the subject, links will come natural.

As a historical side-note, in the old days, even quick on-page optimization might have worked though; like stuffing the meta keywords of a page with terms one deemed relevant to one's site (whether that was the case or not). As of many years, such things as meta keywords are mostly ignored by engines and serve no useful purpose in SEO.

A more unnatural technique of getting backlinks are paid links. Special link buying systems had sprung up in the past, often affecting organic results. A group of search engines got together to create the "nofollow" HTML attribute, originally mainly aimed to disable the "link juice" of comment spam, but later on, also aimed to fight paid links. Both paid links but also attempts to penalize paid links, as they are active in search engines like Google today, have received their share of controversy.

Closely related to SEO but not the same is paid placement/ paid inclusion (both SEO and paid placement are a part of SEM, search engine marketing). Paid placement is the business of buying ads in search engines to gather new visitors for one's websites. Normal results in search results are often referred to as "organic" rankings. Ads are not part of the organic ranking, and they follow different rules than search engine optimization (though, at least with Google AdWords, it's not just the price tag you put on an item that determines the result ad ranking).

Besides the kind of SEO done by the hobby webmaster for their own sites, with varying results, there's a whole industry of SEO consultants... with, it should be noted, varying results as well. When choosing a search engine optimization agency for your company's website or similar it is thus important to choose wisely, and know what they're doing. In the past, websites who didn't check up on these issues were also banned by Google due to shady techniques.