What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization - SEO is a term described as a set of techniques used to achieve high ranking in search engines and quality visits, whether organic or natural, from search engines. Everyone with a website online wants to get high ranking and a marked increase in traffic through popular search engines as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. SEO is a large term that encapsulates Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Link building strategies into it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Methods:

Various methods are adopted by Search Engine Optimizers (also known as SEOs) or Search Engine Consultants to facilitate their clients. In the way to achieve quality and fully optimized websites from search engine perspective, Search Engine Optimizers use two popular trends:

White Hat SEO

These are the ethical techniques used by optimizers to improve site traffic through search engines and to secure higher rank in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).

Black Hat SEO

These tricks and techniques are considered near to illegal way of boosting website traffic and ranking. Manipulation of search engine mechanism is done to and it may include techniques as spamming, link farming, cloaking and spamdexing.

Of these two techniques, most of the SEO consultants prefer to use White Hat techniques reject black hat tricks, since search engines as Google is known to black list black hatter sites. Search Engine Principles and Terms

optimizing the websites, there are certain common terms and principles vital to be understood. They explain the architecture and working of search engines to the core, hence making SEO an easier and understandable job. Let's have a brief overview of search engine principles:

SERP (Search Engine Result Page)

SERP is the detailed list of web pages or web documents that are returned by the search engine as a response to any search query made.

Spider

This is a program that acts like a browser by downloading web pages. But instead of displaying the information in form of text and graphics, it works directly on the underlying HTML code of a page.

Crawler

It's a program that has been designed to automatically follow all the links embedded in a web page. Crawler helps in determining the pre-defined set of addresses for the spider. New documents getting on-line are cached through this crawler program.

Indexer

It's a program that uses information provided by both Spider and Crawler to parse page components. All the stylizing and structural features such as HTML tags, Meta, headers, titles, content are parsed to facilitate searching.

Database Repository

All the information regarding the websites and WebPages is indexed and stored here.

Results Engine

When a search query is made through a search engine, this Result Engine uses searching algorithms to match web pages as required by the search query. The database helps the engine to find web document information.

Web Server

Web server acts as the key to relate and interact between the web documents and the user.

Despite knowing great deal into the working of search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still a vague and far from exact science.