SEO "Search Engine Optimization"

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the course of action to improve the quantity and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “organic” search results.

The short form “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers”. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective and efficient SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a website, SEO strategy may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to explain web site designs, content management systems, menus, and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories:

Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (White hat SEO), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve (Black hat SEO). White hats are liable to produce results that last for a long time, whereas black hats predict that their sites may sooner or later be banned either temporarily or permanently 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 fraud. White hat SEO is not just about following guiding principle (guideline), but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and consequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat recommendation is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easy to get to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, even though the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO improve rankings in ways that are disapproved by the search engines, or involve cheating. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden or out of sight, 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 visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites whom they discover using black hat methods, either by lessening their rankings or eliminating their listings from their database in total. Such penalties can be practical either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review. One well-known example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of unreliable practices. Both the companies, apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.