About A Work Of Art, Inc. Logo Design company in Fort Lauderdale, United States
A Work Of Art Inc. (awoa.com) based in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs Florida along with many other webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page or URL to the various engines which would send a spider to ’crawl’ that page extract links to other pages from it and return information found on the page to be indexed.
The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engines own server where a second program known as an indexer extracts various information about the web page such as the words it contains and where these are located as well as any weight for specific words as well as any and all links the page contains which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag or index files in engine. Meta tags provide a guide to each pages content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmasters choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the sites actual content. Inaccurate incomplete and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches.
Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmasters control early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters.
Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.
Google headquarters Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency meta tags headings links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging buying and selling links often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes or link farms involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.
In recent years major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age sex location and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.By 2007 search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The three leading search engines Google Yahoo and Microsofts Live Search do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages.
Getting indexed – The leading search engines Google Yahoo! and Microsoft use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines notably Yahoo! operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Yahoos paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors.
Two major directories the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found especially pages that arent discoverable by automatically following links.Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
White hat versus black hat – SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods and the practitioners who employ them as either white hat SEO or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments this is an important distinction to note.
White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users not for search engines and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden either as text colored similar to the background in an invisible div or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine a technique known as cloaking.Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether.
Marketing strategies considered – Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages) looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. However more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective depending on the site operators goals.
A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages building high quality web pages to engage and persuade addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes and improving a sites conversion rate. In addition paid search results or ’Pay Per Click’ campaigns are certainly not the way to go for many business types for various reasons such as low profit margins and low sales volume combined with popular key word associations.
Author - David Nagle
