View source for SEO - The Basics about How It's Done

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a process which deals with improving a web site's visibility in search engines, in the no - cost search results. SEO is one of the internet marketing strategies, whose aim is to ensure the web presence of a web site. SEO should make a site appear more frequently and higher on search results lists. The site will then be better - known, it will attract more visitors, which is the ultimate goal. SEO is applicable to many types of searches, such as an image search, a video search, a local search, an academic search, a news search, and many more.

The process of SEO resembles a profiling process - it takes into account the way that people think, what they are looking for, how they phrase their search, and which is the search engine that the target group uses the most. The next step of the process would be to change and adjust the content and coding accordingly, so that the web site's relevance to certain keywords is increased. This also serves to remove the barriers to indexing activities of search engines. In short, indexing activities refer to the method by which search engines obtain URLs for fast searches. A web crawler, for example, is used for this purpose - it is a software agent which browses the world wide web in an orderly way. Then it provides a copy of the downloaded web pages to search engines. This is done so that search engines can stay up to date with the thousands of new web pages that are set up every day.

Another way to improve SEO is to promote a web site so it has a bigger number of backlinks. Backlinks are the incoming links to a certain web page, and they are also called inbound links. Backlinks used to be used for web navigation, however today search engines perform that role. Lately, backlinks are being used to determine the ranking and popularity of a web page (such as Google's PageRank). Also, they are used to analyze the kind of visitors which are attracted to that web page. Using inbound links is SEO can be done in a simple and easy way by basically anyone, but there are also some considerably more complex methods as well. Linkbaiting calls for a lot of marketing and planning beforehand, although sometimes it can happen spontaneously.

Spamdexing is another approach of SEO, also known as black hat SEO. Keyword stuffing, link farms and article spinning are the main activities of black hat SEO. In general, these actions degrade the user's quality of service by deteriorating the quality of the results of the search. However, search engines are able to track down the web sites that do these activities, and remove them from their indices. 

The people that do SEO are called search engine optimizers. SEOs are consultants that provide SEO services to their clients, as a part of a marketing campaign or as an individual service. Because SEO often requires changes in the content and coding, SEOs are often involved in the process of setting up the web site and the web design.