Search Engine Optimization

From SEO / SEM best practices and ethics

Search Engine Optimization entails improving the overal organizational structure of a website and entails naming the pages using appropriate keywords. Also structuring directories correctly and making the web page and web site intuitive and easy to navigate. Search engine optimization is part an art and part a science. It is an evolving field that has gained popularity and made some experts celebrities as well. These techniques have also been abused since the beginning, but over time search engines have developed more sophisticated algorithms to detect spam and rank pages based on many patented methods and various factors such as how many backlinks a page has and what type of sites link to a page and what their themes consist of etc. Basically you want a web page to rank high if it is organized well, easy to read and navigate, the headings and subheadings are relevant, other related sites (specially authority sites) link to it and it has been around for some time and therefore has aged to maturity. Also you want to see that the domain is hosted on a clean server not tied to spammers, and maybe even hosted from an IP that is close by or in the country where you are. Search engine marketing has grown over time and is now a multi billion dollar industry. Overall search engine optimization involves studying search engine results and examining the pages that are indexed and ranked and reverse engineering the process and then trying to trump what you see over time. Ethical means should always be used and ultimately there is some luck involved to a certain degree. The future is hard to predict since the industry is changing rapidly and now search engines are starting to not only index text documents, but other forms of documents such as pdfs as well as audio files and video and pictures. All of these areas open up new challenges for optimizers and opportunities as well. By SEO