In today�s net-savvy world it has become common for any business to
have a website which they use mostly for advertising their products and
services. With the advent of search engines it has become even easier
for the customers to search for the stuff online. For a website to be
successful its link should land in the first three pages which the
search engine brings and the rank of the page should be high which means
many visitors come to the site. This can be achieved by applying search
engine optimization or popularly known as SEO. This is a marketing
strategy which increases the quality and quantity of traffic flow to a
particular website via search engines.
SEO not only affects the search engine results, but also image
search, video search and industry specific vertical search engines. It
determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular
with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a
spider crawls through a page to gather links which lead to other pages
and stores those pages on the server of the search engine. The
information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer, whose job
is to extract information from those pages such as the keywords and
their weights, the location of the page and other links that are stored
for the spider to crawl in future.
In the beginning, the search engine optimizer algorithms were
dependant on the keywords, Meta tags, and index files provided by the
Webmaster. Meta tags provided information about a particular page, but
using them for indexing the pages didn�t prove to be successful as some
Webmasters added irrelevant Meta tags to increase the number of hits and
earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML of the web pages to
achieve a good rank for the page. But this was a case of abuse as it
fetched irrelevant pages.
Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithm, which
were difficult for the webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web
surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated
mathematically by functions using strength and quantity of the inbound
links. The higher the rank of the page the more chances it had to be
viewed by a person. Later algorithms were developed which considered
various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as
hyperlink. Since the webmasters couldn�t manipulate the page rank, they
began exchanging, selling and buying links, which lead to link spamming
and even creation of numerous sites dedicated for this purpose.
Algorithms became more complex by every passing day and top search
engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased,
advertisers were roped in to pay for it, which finally resulted in high
quality web pages. Although investing in SEO is very fruitful, but at
the same time is risky because with out any prior notice the algorithms
being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing
visitors to the page. Many consultants are available in the market that
provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code of the web
site like menus, shopping carts and sometimes even the content of the
website to draw more traffic. Search engines use algorithms that extract
pages not according to the page rank but according to the cost per
click or set fee, that is if a advertiser desires that the page
containing his ad be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it. This
is a point of controversy, as only the big businesses will be able to
increase the number of hits of their page but not the small business who
might be having a better quality page.
Google Ad Words explores ads which have words typed in the search box
by the surfer. The Million Dollar Homepage started the concept of Pixel
advertising, which is a graphical kind of advertising. Depending on the
pixels, the space is sold to the advertiser. Keyword advertising
involves advertisers who buy URLs of a site and place their ads at that
location. Thus SEO is a market in its own which is yielding great
results for businesses on Internet.