Introduction:

The earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. So for a better web presence, optimization of the website is important to meet the quality guidelines of the search engines. The first step in SEO is understanding the basic criteria a search engine uses in order to index a website. According to this, a webmaster or the search engine optimiser need to modify the website.

Definition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines.

History:

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s.Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "backrub," a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, Page Rank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. Page Rank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher Page Rank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer. Page and Brin founded Google in 1998.

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. In 2007 Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer Page Rank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of Page Rank sculpting by use of the no follow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat no followed links in the same way, in order to prevent SEO service providers from using no follow for Page Rank sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of no follow leads to evaporation of page rank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace no followed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit Page Rank sculpting. Additionally several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and JavaScript. In 2005 Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users. Real-time-search was introduced in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.

SEO-Classification:

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

SEO techniques:

1.Have a good content is the most important factor in building good traffic to a website. A page with inadequate content is unlikely to get some traffic even if all other methods to manipulate search engines are used. Leading search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo uses complex algorithms that a webmaster cannot manipulate. Create content for user not for search engines.

2.Meta tags like Title and description are important to search engines. Keyword meta tags are not so important these days. Have the proper meta tags to your website. Use heading (h1, h2 etc.) in content. Search engines, reads your title tag and description tag and then the h1, h2 etc to correlate with the title tag. Title should use the strongest keyword and it should be repeated in your description and in content. Do not simply add the keywords in Title and description, use meaningful phrases or sentences instead with your keywords.

3.The HTML code should be error free. Search engine tends to stop crawling, as they find more HTML errors. Use an HTML validate to check the code.

4.Cross Link your pages. Home page should have links to your menu pages and the menu pages have links to submenu pages and so on. While crawling, search engine keeps a copy of your home page for a later processing and it follows the links inside the home page. A site map is thus important to provide an information to search engine about how your pages are linked.

5.Search engines cannot read images. So always use alt text for images. alt text is something that describe what the image is about. You can use the keywords for that.

6.Links on your pages should not be more than 200. Some search engines find it difficult to crawl when there are more links in a page. You can use 'no follow' attribute for unimportant links that the search engines need not follow.

7.Link building is important in higher page ranking. Do not use link building services as it may harm you eventually. Instead, use article marketing to build your links. You can also write useful comments on websites with a link back to your site. Participate in forum and you can post your URL with your question or answer. If you have more links from a single website, only 2 or 3 links are considered by search engines. So use different sites to build your links.

8.URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the "canonical" meta tag or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page's link popularity score.

9.Make Use of social media sites for popularity of website among people.

10.The search ranking is vaporized with the advancement in search engine algorithms. Personalized search results makes it more difficult. So it is important to have a proper relationship with your visitors by adding a contact form or comment section. Reply to your visitor’s messages and comments and encourage them to revisit your pages. Start an email campaign to inform the subscribers about the recent updates from your website.

Conclusion:

SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals. Remember that white hat SEO is always safer and effective. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility.