SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the position of a given website in the organic or natural results on a search engine. When someone uses a search engine to find a product the listings that show up as a result of the terms they type in are how websites get found. The results as determined by the search engine are in order of the most relevant listings first and those listings with only a limited relation to the query, last. The purpose of improving the organic search results would be to increase relevant traffic volume and quality to the website of potential customers.
Search engines determine these results based on their individual algorithms. The algorithms are designed to produce the most relevant websites for targeted words being searched for. These words, used by actual humans looking for a specific good or service, are referred to as Key Words. So the algorithm is the mathematical formula that the search engine uses to determine which websites are most relevant to the terms in the target search. The earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it ranks, the more searchers will visit that site. That means that if a business website is not found in the first few results for a search, that website is not going to get much traffic or business.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a website ranking or relevance, or Search Engine Optimizers consider how search engine algorithms work and how the target audience will search for a particular good or service. , (Search Engine Optimizing) efforts will involve a websites coding, presentation, content and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully indexing the site. An SEO will often include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more user friendly.
This means the SEO has to be able to pick out which keywords are most likely to be used by future customers when they are searching for what the website has to offer. It is of little value to target a key word or phrase that has little relevancy to what the website has to offer since it will just aggravate the people searching and will not result in quality traffic to the site.
SEO became necessary because of the History of Search on the internet. When the World Wide Web first went public, search technology was very basic. Similar to a self governed library where the search directories relied heavily on the input of individual webmasters to accurately enter information regarding their websites. As business became aware of the power of internet marketing, competition for high ranking on search results led to attempting to falsely manipulate search results. This manipulation of Search Results was actually the beginning of SEO. Not very glorious, but as search ranking became so competitive, even a legitimate business website had to struggle to be found in the relevant results.
Search Engines have become better at seeing the false manipulations and regain control and insure that each one doing a search gets only the most relevant results. At one time, Yahoo was the most used Search Engine on the planet. But when the information in Yahoo presented became more polluted with garbage (websites that truly were not relevant to the search) seachers began going elsewhere for more relevant results. Because of that, Google now dominates as the dominate Search Engine giant.
Although Google is king, it knows that it can only be king as long as it presents good results. Billions of dollars are spent by search engines every year to continue to fine tune and adjust the algorithm to take out the unwanted information. SEO works to make the client website rank high enough within those search results to promote the needed traffic.
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