 At BecomeNumberOne,
we specialize heavily
in successful search engine Optimization
and use the very latest tools and techniques in achieving top
Google & Yahoo rankings for our customers. We always incorporate
these methods into every website that we deliver.
We also offer full search engine Optimization
services for customers with existing websites.
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing
sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the
first search engines were cataloging the early Web.
Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a
page, or URL, to the various 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 recognize the value of having
their sites highly ranked and visible in search
engine results. According to industry analyst Danny
Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase
"search engine optimization" was a spam message
posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.
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 provided a guide to each page's content.
But using meta data to index pages was found to be
less than reliable because the webmaster's account
of keywords in the meta tag were not truely relevant
to the site's actual keywords. Inaccurate,
incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags
caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web
content providers also manipulated a number of
attributes within the HTML source of a page in an
attempt to rank well in search engines.
By relying so much on factors exclusively within a
webmaster's control, early search engines suffered
from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide
better results to their users, search engines had to
adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most
relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages
stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous
webmasters. 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, PageRank, is a function of the
quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank
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 PageRank page is more likely to
be reached by the random surfer.
Google opens headquarters in Buenos Aires,
ArgentinaPage and Brin founded Google in 1998.
Google attracted a loyal following among the growing
number of Internet users, who liked its simple
design. Off-page factors such as PageRank and
hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as
on-page factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind
of manipulation seen in search engines that only
considered on-page factors for their rankings.
Although PageRank was more difficult to game,
webmasters had already developed link building tools
and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine,
and these methods proved similarly applicable to
gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging,
buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale.
Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the
creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose
of link spamming.
To reduce the impact of link schemes, as of 2007,
search engines consider a wide range of undisclosed
factors for their ranking algorithms. Google says it
ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.
The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the
algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs,
such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and
Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to
search engine optimization, and have published their
opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO
practitioners may also study patents held by various
search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.
Webmasters and search engines
By 1997 search engines recognized that some
webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their
search engines, and even manipulating the page
rankings in search results. Early search engines,
such as Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to
prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings by
stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant
keywords.
Due to the high marketing value of targeted search
results, there is potential for an adversarial
relationship between search engines and SEOs. In
2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial
Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to
discuss and minimize the damaging effects of
aggressive web content providers.
SEO companies that employ overly aggressive
techniques can get their client websites banned from
the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal
profiled a company, Traffic Power, that allegedly
used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose
those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported
that the same company sued blogger Aaron Wall for
writing about the ban.Google's Matt Cutts later
confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power
and some of its clients.
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO
industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at
SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the
advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now
have a vested interest in the health of the
optimization community. Major search engines provide
information and guidelines to help with site
optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program[20] to
help webmasters learn if Google is having any
problems indexing their website and also provides
data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! Site
Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit
URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo!
index and view link information.
Getting indexed
The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and
Microsoft, 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. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!,
operate a paid submission service that guarantee
crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.
Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the
database, but do not guarantee specific ranking
within the search results. Yahoo's paid inclusion
program has drawn criticism from advertisers and
competitors. Two major directories, the Yahoo
Directory and the Open Directory Project both
require manual submission and human editorial
review. Google offers Google Sitemaps, for which an
XML type feed can be created and submitted for free
to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages
that aren't discoverable by automatically following
links.
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.
Preventing indexing
Main article: Robots Exclusion Standard
To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes,
webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain
files or directories through the standard robots.txt
file in the root directory of the domain.
Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from
a search engine's database by using a meta tag
specific to robots. When a search engine visits a
site, the robots.txt located in the root directory
is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is
then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which
pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine
crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may
on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish
crawled. Pages typically prevented from being
crawled include login specific pages such as
shopping carts and user-specific content such as
search results from internal searches. In March
2007, Google warned webmasters that they should
prevent indexing of internal search results because
those pages are considered search spam.
White hat versus black hat
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.
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 game the
algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to
web development that promotes accessibility,
although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO attempts 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. 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 apologized, fixed the offending pages, and
were restored to Google's list.
As a marketing strategy
Eye 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 search results to 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.
SEO may generate a return on investment. However,
search engines are not paid for organic search
traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no
guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack
of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies
heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major
losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.
It is considered wise business practice for website
operators to liberate themselves from dependence on
search engine traffic.[39] A top ranked SEO blog
Seomoz.org has reported, "Search marketers, in a
twist of irony, receive a very small share of their
traffic from search engines." Instead, their main
sources of traffic are links from other websites. |
