Because of the huge importance of search engines, many webmasters have come to use it as a means to get more visitors to visit their site. One way of doing this is by optimizing the page to make it more searchable. This form of internet marketing is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a means of increasing and improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website via "Natural" search engine results. By "Natural", it means "algorithmic" or by a set of instructions set by search engine companies. So what is an SEO?
A better question to ask is how to get a website indexed? When a website is new, let's say an online gift shop, and that it's not even listed on any SERPs (search engine return pages) yet, the first step that webmasters take is to submit their site to search engines like Google and Yahoo. Now even though its already been submitted or the site has all the gift items that a person could ever had, this still wouldn't cut it to get the high rank. And because of this, when people search for the term "online gift shop," they could end up going
SEO involves a lot of work. It 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. Another is building up link partners with relevant and important websites. And a more recent strategy is by use of social media. Check out more about SEO by visiting an online SEO Philippines site.
Though SEO may seem very straight forward, there are several things that webmasters should be looking at. 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 engines 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 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. Learn more about SEO by visting an online SEO Philippines firm.
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. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.
Optimizing a website isn't always as straight forward as it seems, which is why SEO consultants are there to assist webmasters on the task. SEO firms are commonly legitimate that follows the guidelines passed down from search engine companies. They can provide assistance such as by tweaking websites to be user oriented and search engine friendly at the same time. If you want to learn more about SEO, then visit an online SEO Philippines company to learn more about it.
Margarette Mcbride is the president of Optimind Web Design and SEO, a web design and seo company in the Philippines. Optimind specializes in building and promoting websites that are designed for conversion.
