Search engine optimization (SEO)
is the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of search engine traffic to a website or web page. Instead of direct traffic or paid traffic, SEO focuses on organic (also known as "natural" or "organic") results.
Unpaid traffic can come from a variety of searches, including image, video, news, academic, and vertical search engines that cater to particular industries.
When used as an Internet marketing strategy, SEO takes into account a variety of factors, including how search engines operate, the computer algorithms that determine how they behave, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords they enter into search engines, and which search engines their intended audience prefers.
SEO is done because websites that rank higher on search engine results pages will get more visitors from search engines (SERP). The potential for converting these visitors into customers then exists.
Methods
Getting indexed
Crawlers are used by popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to find pages for their algorithmic search results.
It is not necessary to submit pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages because the search engines will find them on their own.
Both manual submission and human editorial review were necessary for the two prominent directories that closed in 2014 and 2017, respectively—the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ.
To ensure that all pages are found, especially those that cannot be found by automatically following links,
Google offers the Google Search Console, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free in addition to their URL submission console. Previously, Yahoo! offered a paid submission service with crawling assurance for a cost per click. However, this service was stopped in 2009.
When crawling a site, search engine spiders may take into account a variety of different things. Search engines do not index every page. Whether or not pages are crawled may also depend on how far the page is from the site's root directory.
Today, the majority of Google searches are conducted on mobile devices. The mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index after they announced a significant change to how they crawl websites in November 2016 and began to make their index mobile-first.
Google upgraded their crawler's rendering engine to the most recent Chromium version in May 2019. (74 at the time of the announcement).
Google promised to keep the Chromium rendering engine updated to the most recent version. 2019 December, In order to reflect the most recent Chrome version used by their rendering service, Google started updating the User-Agent string of their crawler.
The wait was necessary to give webmasters enough time to update the code that handled specific bot User-Agent strings. Google conducted assessments and believed the effects would be minimal.
Preventing crawling
Webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl specific files or directories through the common robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain to prevent undesirable content from appearing in search indexes.
Additionally, a page can be specifically blocked from being indexed by a search engine by using a meta tag designated for robots (typically, meta name="robots" content="noindex">).
The first file a search engine crawls when it visits a website is the robots.txt file in the root directory. The robot is then told which pages are not to be crawled by the robot after the robots.txt file has been parsed.
A search engine crawler might keep a cached copy of this file, so occasionally it might access pages that the webmaster doesn't want indexed.
Login-specific pages, such as shopping carts, and user-specific content, such as search results from internal searches, are frequently prohibited from being crawled.
Google issued a warning to webmasters in March 2007 stating that internal search results should not be indexed as they are regarded as search spam.
Google no longer considers the standard to be a directive but rather a hint after it was sunsetted in 2020 (and opened-sourced). A page-level robots meta tag should be used to properly ensure that pages are not indexed.
Increasing prominence
There are numerous ways to improve a webpage's prominence in the search results. Cross-linking on the same website's pages to provide more links to key pages may increase its visibility.
Users are more likely to trust and stay on a website when it has a good page design. A website suffers when users leave quickly; this lowers their credibility.
In order to be relevant to a wide range of search queries, it is usually more effective to include popular keyword phrases in content.
A site can gain more authority by regularly updating its content to keep search engines coming back. When relevant keywords are added to a web page's metadata, such as the title tag and meta description, the relevancy of a site's search listings tends to improve, which boosts traffic.
The canonical link element, 301 redirects, or URL canonicalization can all be used to ensure that links to different versions of a page's URL count toward the page's link popularity score.
These are referred to as incoming links that point to the URL and can affect a website's credibility by contributing to the popularity score of the page link.
Additionally, Google has recently prioritized the elements below for SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position).
- HTTPS version (Secure Site)
- Page Speed
- Structured Data
- Mobile Compatibility
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
- BERT
White hat versus black hat techniques
There are two broad categories of SEO tactics: those that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those that search engines disapprove of ("black hat").
The latter, including spamdexing, is one of the ways search engines try to reduce its impact. These techniques and the practitioners who use them have been categorized by industry commentators as either white hat SEO or black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO
expect that once the search engines find out what they are doing, their sites may eventually be temporarily or permanently banned, whereas white hats typically produce results that last a long time.
If an SEO strategy follows the search engines' rules and is completely honest, it is said to be "white hat." This is a crucial distinction to make, as the search engine guidelines are not presented as a list of laws or commandments.
White hat SEO
involves more than just adhering to rules; it also entails making sure that the content that search engines index and then rank is the same content that users will actually see.
White hat advice can be summed up as making content for users rather than search engines and then making it easily accessible to the online "spider" algorithms. This is opposed to trying to deceive the algorithm by doing what it was designed to do.
Although they are not the same, accessible web development and white hat SEO are similar in many ways.
Black hat SEO aims to boost rankings through techniques the search engines find objectionable or dishonest. One black hat method makes use of hidden text, which can be off-screen, in an invisible div, or with a background color that matches the text.
Another approach, called cloaking, returns a different page depending on whether a human visitor or a search engine is making the request. Grey hat SEO is another category that is occasionally used.
Between black hat and white hat strategies, this one uses techniques that keep the site from getting penalized but don't necessarily produce the best content for users. The sole goal of grey hat SEO is to raise one's position in search results.
When they find websites using black hat or grey hat techniques, search engines may penalize them by lowering their rankings or removing their listings entirely from their databases. Such sanctions may be imposed manually or automatically by the algorithms of the search engines.
as a marketing strategy.
Depending on the objectives of the website operator, SEO may not be the best Internet marketing strategy for every website and may not be as effective as other strategies like paid advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Designing, managing, and optimizing search engine ad campaigns is known as search engine marketing (SEM). The most straightforward way to explain how it differs from SEO is to compare paid and unpaid priority rankings in search results.
Website designers should give SEM the highest priority possible because it places more emphasis on prominence than on relevance and because most users will only look at the top listings of a search engine.
In order to engage and persuade online users, high-quality web pages must be created. A successful Internet marketing campaign may also rely on installing analytics software that allows site owners to track results and increase a site's conversion rate.
Google's 160-page Search Quality Rating Guidelines were made available to the public in November 2015, and they showed a shift in emphasis towards "usefulness" and mobile local search.
As demonstrated by StatCounter in October 2016 when they examined 2.5 million websites and discovered that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device, the mobile market has exploded recently, surpassing the use of desktops.
One company taking advantage of the rise in mobile usage is Google, which promotes the use of the Mobile-Friendly Test within the Google Search Console.
This tool enables businesses to assess how user-friendly their websites are by comparing them to search engine results. The ranking of the key terms will increase the closer the key words are together.
SEO might produce a respectable return on investment. There are no guarantees of ongoing referrals, search engines' algorithms change, and they are not compensated for organic search traffic.
A company that depends heavily on search engine traffic may experience significant losses if the search engines stop sending customers because of the lack of assurance and the unpredictability.
The search engine ranking of a website may change as a result of a change in search engine algorithm, potentially leading to a significant drop in traffic. Google made over 500 algorithm changes in 2010, or nearly 1.5 per day, according to CEO Eric Schmidt.
Website owners are advised to break their dependence on search engine traffic as a prudent business practice.
User web accessibility has grown in significance for SEO in addition to web crawler accessibility (which was covered above).