 Search engine optimisation(SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the higher a site ranks in the search results, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Another class of techniques, known as Black Hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm the search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices. For this reason Software Services does not employ these sort of techniques.
View our Bronze Search Engine Optimization Package HistoryWebmasters and content providers began optimising sites for search engines in the 1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early World Wide Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various search engines which would send a spider to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Site owners started to recognise the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results. They also recognised that the higher their site ranked, the more people would click through to the website. Early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation by relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster's control. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. By 2007, 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. White Hat versus Black HatSEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: Industry commentators have classified 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 may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. Software Services does not employ any Black Hat techniques in it's SEO. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. 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 trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologised, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list Marketing StrategyEye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. 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. A successful internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site's conversion rate. |
   |
0845 226 9159
