SEO is a technique to increase website traffic and revenue by ranking high in search engine results. SEO professionals use various methods, including keywords and code, to achieve this. Ethical practices are important, as unethical practices can result in search engine bans.
SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimization”, a commercial technique for ensuring a website ranks high in search engine results. This increases traffic to the site and often revenue for the related business. An SEO professional is a person who is trained to facilitate this process. There are numerous techniques to increase search engine optimization, the most ethical ones, but some less so. SEO can also mean “search engine optimizer”, another name for an SEO professional.
The Internet, originally designed for academic and government use, expanded into commercial activity in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, the explosive growth of web pages resulted in the first search engines, sites designed specifically to locate specific pages. for Internet users. Soon, the sheer volume of web traffic made search engine results overwhelmingly long. Software engineers have devised ways to push websites to the top of these results pages, increasing traffic to those websites. The phrase “search engine optimization” was first used in 1997 and soon developed a wide currency.
The advent of Google in 1998 changed the search process, offering new challenges to the SEO professional. Google’s unique software primarily ranks websites according to their relevance to a particular search phrase, rather than looking for related words and phrases within the websites themselves. As SEO techniques at the time focused on these phrases, called keywords, SEO professionals needed to rework their methods. Google and similar search engines jealously protected the calculations or algorithms employed by their software. Eventually, search engines started working with SEO companies, providing guidelines and suggested practices, although specific algorithms are still trade secrets.
The SEO professional uses a variety of methods to raise a website to the ranking of a search engine. Keywords are still important, as are other elements of a page’s content and its code, the programming used to create the page. Some methods involve simple marketing, like knowing which search engines people are most likely to use. The habits of Internet users are also vital: what people are looking for and how they are likely to phrase the search. Increasing the number of sites linking to a specific site also adds weight to its appearance on search engine pages.
There is a code of ethics that guides the behavior of the SEO professional. In the SEO industry, those who abide by these ethics are called “white hats” while those who use unethical practices are called “black hats”. The terms refer to old Hollywood Westerns, where hats were sometimes used to distinguish heroes from villains in fight scenes. Unethical behavior includes deceptive page and code design and unfair manipulation of search algorithms, a practice called “spamdexing”. These techniques may briefly create the desired effect, but often result in search engines banning not only the website, but the related SEO professional or company as well.
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