There are several descriptions of the phrase Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO. It can be called a utilization of various ways to improve a website’s standing, or an act of improving a website’s search engine compatibility by better formatting the site’s coding, structure, and content. Search Engine Optimization may also be used interchangeably with the term Search Engine Marketing, which seeks to increase site screening and enhancing a search engine’s organic positioning so that it attracts more traffic.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is the method of enhancing the appearance of a website or a webpage through natural search results. The sooner and higher a website shows up in a search results list, the more accessible it will be to web surfers. SEO may take into account various kind of information research, be it image search, video search, or industry related vertical search. Optimizing a website may involve its content editing and HTML coding in order to increase its association with key words and eliminating the blockades to the indexing activities of search engines.

Discussed below are three prominent ways that are involved in Search Engine Optimization. These include indexing, crawling prevention, and enhance the prominence of a web site.

Indexing:

Prominent search engines make use of crawlers to access web pages for their ‘algorithmic’ search results. While those web pages that are joined by other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted to, other search engines accept websites on a paid basis and ensure crawling. This is done at either an agreed upon charge or on a cost per click basis. It should be noted that while these search engines guarantee a website’s presence in their data base, they do not provide for any specific positioning or ranking.

Crawling Prevention:

In order to prevent unacceptable content in search indexes, webmaster can utilize the robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. When a search engine goes to a website, the robots.txt file at the base of the root directory is the first to be crawled. After this file is scrawled, it indicates to the robot as to which web pages are to be prevented from being crawled. Moreover, robot specific meta tags can used to completely exclude a webpage from a search engine’s data base.

Enhancing Prominence:

There are several ways in which a webpage can be made to appear more speedily and prominently through a web search. Webmasters can make use of cross linking between pages of similar websites, or edit the content of a web page so that commonly searched keywords serve to enhance traffic to a website. They may also tweak the content of website in order to keep search engines crawling frequently, providing added weight to a specific website. Other methods include adding pertinent keywords to a page’s Meta data, stating the title tag and Meta description of a website, and URL normalization of web pages that can be pulled up through several URLs, using the canonical Meta tag.