In 1997, the concept of search engine optimization was born. It followed shortly upon the heels of the launch of the very first online search engines. The main idea behind search engine optimization – or SEO, as it is known for short – it to help webmasters attain the highest ranking on search engines. In turn, more traffic will be brought to their websites. When people are able to bring more traffic to their website, that means that they have a greater chance of doing business online. Thus, search engine optimization has emerged in recent years as a lucrative business. It has become a self contained industry with specialists in the field whose role is to bring businesses a higher quantity – and quality – of visitors to a particular website.
Things have certainly changed a lot since the early days of the World Wide Web. It used to be that webmasters could simply manipulate the original search engines’ indexing systems in order to increase their rank. This could be accomplished by providing false information about their sites in order to lure more visitors there.
Such practices became known as “Black Hat” search engine optimization. Black hat practices gave rise to new search engines, represented today by Yahoo and Google. These search engines utilized complex algorithms as a way of making it not so easy to score well on searches. The idea was to provide organic search results, rather than something that the webmasters themselves were capable of controlling and manipulating to their own advantage. These complicated new algorithms would take in to consideration a variety of different factors, such as term frequency, domain name, keyword proximity, keyword sequence, and HTML tags.
It was Google in particular who revolutionized search engines with a thing called PageRank. While previous search engines relied on information provided by web masters, Google’s PageRank would measure the amount of incoming links to a particular website. The higher the site scored on PageRank, the more likely a random surfer would stumble upon that web page anyway.
To those still intent on doing things the Black Hat way, PageRank proved to be a major challenge. What Black Hat practitioners then began to do was exchange, sell, and purchase the most precious links available for their sites. Those utilizing search engine optimization black hat techniques are always on the look out for ways to crack the constantly changing algorithms put in place by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This is incredibly risky business, though. If you are caught employing black hat techniques, then your website might be denoted in rank or even completely banned from a search engine.
Legal search engine optimization tactics are known as “White Hat” practices. Such practices entail the creation of real content for actual users. That content is then optimized as a means of attaining a higher ranking. All the guidelines that a particular search engine has set out are adhered to. This leads to a higher quality and higher quantity of website traffic.