What Is Search Engine Optimization Marketing is a common and necessary practice in every business. Since the explosion of the internet, almost all businesses demand a presence on the internet. It is wise to, therefore, have an effective marketing practice on the internet. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is such a method of increasing a business, or a website’s visibility on the internet.
Search engine optimization will aim to increase the visibility of a particular web site by understanding how search engines work. People tend to type in a specific set of words or phrases when looking for something on the internet. Search engine optimization will try to promote a website by making it appear as a relevant and highly sought result for those keywords.
Search engine optimization is done through a variety of methods. Typically the website will have to have highly relevant content that matches the keywords that people will be searching for. They may also want to have relevant links to the web site, whether it is inbound or outbound (also known as backlinks), links with another reputable web site can increase the relevance of a web site, thereby making backlinks a valuable tool.
Search engines aim to deliver a satisfactory experience to their users by providing easy and relevant search methods and results. With increasing search engine optimization practices, search engines are facing adulterated results that have been “optimized” for visibility yet lack relevance. Search engines have algorithms that automatically calculate and score a web site’s rank, its relevance to certain keywords based on its content.
Search engine optimization services are savvy to the search engine algorithms and may apply short cuts and tricks to optimize their customer’s web sites without having legitimate content. The search engines are also savvy to such practice and are finding ways to perfect their algorithms to overcome such SEO shortcuts and tricks. This is a constant, ongoing battle and rivalry between SEO practitioners and search engines and their respective clients, the web site owners, and users.
Not all search engine optimization practices are frowned upon by search engines. Search engines just want to deliver the best, most relevant search results to their users (so that they will continue to use their search engines). If a search engine optimization practice actually makes a web site relevant and high ranking with real content that the users are looking for, that provides the ideal situation for the search engines, their users, and the optimized web site.
A legitimate practice of SEO that delivers real results is known as white hat SEO. Because the contents of a web site will be optimized to match what users are looking for, the results of white hat SEO will be long-lasting. Black hat SEO, on the other hand, may use short cuts, gimmicky tricks, and even deception. Because the strategies of a black hat SEO may be tricky, search engines may even penalize the use of such deception by removing the web site entirely from their search results.
As long as there is internet in the free market, there will be a constant ongoing rivalry of search engines and search engine marketers to increase relevance and optimization. In the meantime, users need to be wary of falsely optimized results if the search engines have not yet caught up to them
