Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
Search engine optimization methods are techniques used by webmasters to get more visibility for their sites in search engine results pages
Search engine results page
A search engine results page (SERP), is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.
Query caching
Some search engines cache SERPs for frequent searches and display the cached SERP instead of a live SERP to increase the performance of the search engine. The search engine updates the SERPs periodically to account for new pages, and possibly to modify the rankings of pages in the SERP.
SERP refreshing can take several days or weeks which can occasionally cause results to be inaccurate or out of date, and new sites and pages to be completely absent.
Different types of results
SERPs of major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing may include different types of listings: contextual, algorithmic or organic search listings, as well as sponsored listings, images, maps, definitions, videos or suggested search refinements.
The major search engines visually differentiate specific content types, such as images, news, and blogs. Many content types have specialized SERP templates and visual enhancements on the main search result page.
[edit] Advertising (Sponsored listings)
SERPs may contain advertisements. This is how commercial search engines fund their operations. Common examples of these advertisements are displayed on the right hand side of the page as small classified style ads or directly above the main organic search results on the left.
How SERP entries are generated?
Major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing primarily use content contained within the Metadata tags of a web page to generate the content that makes up a search snippet.[citation needed] The title tag will be used as the title of the snippet while the most relevant or useful contents of the web page (description tag or page copy) will be used for the description. If the web page is not available, information about the page from dmoz may be used instead.
SERP Tracking
Webmasters use Search engine optimization to increase their website’s ranking on a specific keyword’s SERP. As a result, webmasters often check SERP’s to track their Search engine optimization progress. To speed up the tracking process, the Rank Ranger platform was developed by group of programmers and seo experts an automated web software to track multiple keywords for multiple websites.
Search engine optimization methods
Getting indexed
The leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
Gray hat techniques
A very good example of such a technique is purchasing links. The average price for a text link depends on the perceived authority of the linking page.[citation needed]. The authority is sometimes measured by Google’s PageRank, although this is not necessarily an accurate way of determining the importance of a page.
While Google is against sale and purchase of links there are people who subscribe to online magazines, memberships and other resources for the purpose of getting a link back to their website.
Another widely used gray hat technique is a webmaster creating multiple ‘micro-sites’ which he or she controls for the sole purpose of cross linking to the target site. Since it is the same owner of all the micro-sites, this is a violation of the principles of the search engine’s algorithms (by self-linking) but since ownership of sites is not traceable by search engines it is impossible to detect and therefore they can appear as different sites, especially when using separate Class-C IPs
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is merely effective marketing, making efforts to deliver quality content to an audience that has requested the quality content. Traditional marketing means have allowed this through transparency and exposure. A search engine’s algorithm takes this into account, such as Google’s PageRank.
Black hat techniques
To improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether.
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