Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and may be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to “search engine optimizers,” an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of customers’ sites. Some commentators, and even a number of SEOs, break down techniques used by practitioners into categories such as “white hat SEO” (techniques generally accepted by search engines, such as building content and improving site value), 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 meticulous 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 natural search results. SEO is first and foremost concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its natural search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords.

Early search engines

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. At first, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, systems to “crawl” the site, and store the collected information. 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 approximately all searches, restricted only by unique names. The search engines then sorted the data by topic, and served results based on pages they had crawled.

Natural search engines

Google was began by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new idea to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. 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 worth. The more incoming links a page had the more “valuable” it is. The worth of each incoming link itself varies straightforwardly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the amount of outgoing links on that page.

The connection 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 launch of the primary Internet search engines. The operators of search engines documented rapidly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In a number of 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 instantly index and rank that page.
Due 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 meeting named AirWeb was created to talk about bridging the gap and minimizing the from time to time damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

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