SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the process by which people work to get their web sites or pages ranked higher in the search engine results. Many techniques are used to achieve this for a web master from optimizing the content to rewriting the HTML source code for the site. All of this with an aim at the goal of making the site more relevant to keyword searches and the search engine indexing activities.
History of Indexing
A web crawler searches the World Wide Web looking for specific information in order to place relevant pages in a search engine results page. When you look at the vast amount of information, the internet contains the speed at which it changes and the number of URL's that all point to the same page you get a feel for the difficulties encountered by these web crawlers.
When a crawler goes out it searches for content on a variety of sites, all of the information it gathers is then placed in what is called the index. Since this is a huge undertaking it can take sometime between crawl and index.
In the early days of the internet search, engine webmasters simply submitted their site to the search engine to be crawled. The program would then use information contained in the HTML code of the site as well as keywords to rank the site. Since search, results were now driven mostly by information in direct control of the webmasters the search engines were abused, as their stated Meta tags were not always relevant to their site.
The next phase of search engine ranking focused on specific algorithms. The crawlers would go out, measure the inbound and outbound links of a particular page, and set its index accordingly. This worked for only a short time as webmasters began link farming in order to rank better in the search results. These and other methods became known as black hat SEO tactics.
White Hat versus Black Hat
SEO activities are listed in one of two broad scopes white hat and black. White hat techniques can be summed up as someone who creates good content then works to make that content easy to find. White hat SEO is generally known as all acceptable practices in order to get a page ranked or indexed properly.
Black hat techniques on the other hand aim at driving massive amounts of traffic to their site knowing that they may be banned from the search engines at any point. Some examples of this we have already seen above but can also include the practice of keyword stuffing content in order to achieve higher ranking in a search. In another variant, the web master will use text that is the same color as the background, this way they can use keywords repetitively that may or may not have anything to do with what is actually on the page.
None of these methods will work for long and will generally end in the site being banned totally from search results. The best advice is that of the white hat techniques use relevant content in a manner, which will allow you to rank higher in the search engines. Using keywords where appropriate and giving visitors a reason to return. This will increase your chances of links to your site and therefore increase your page rank.
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