Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a site in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to “search engine optimizers,” an activity of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients’ websites. A number of commentators, and even some SEOs, break down techniques used by practitioners into categories such as “white hat SEO” (methods generally accepted by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or “black hat SEO” (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters say that black hat techniques are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an effort to manipulate rankings, and that the particular techniques one uses to rank well are irrelevant.
Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a site by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords.
Early search engines
Webmasters and subject matter providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the initial search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to “crawl” the website, and store the collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire webpage for so-called related search words, so a page with many dissimilar words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches, restricted only by unique names. The search engines then sorted the data by subject, and served results based on pages they had crawled.
Organic search engines
Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This notion, called PageRank, has been significant to the Google algorithm from the beginning. PageRank relies a great deal on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the amount of outgoing links on that page.
The relationship between SEO and the search engines
The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don’t come into view on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the open of the first Online search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster business were making efforts to rank in a good way in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search findings. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as simple as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantaneously index and rank that page.
Owing to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was generated to talk about bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of forceful web content providers.
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