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 like Yahoo has 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.
