Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site.

What is SEO

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. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevancy, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. 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 game the algorithm. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Article Directory benefits

Articles have always been a way to market a business on and off the net. Article submissions are popular, and for good reason. Articles are still a great way to boost internet businesses and can provide SEO backlinks and anchor text. Articles placed on typical articles sites are good, however, the key to gaining recognition is getting your articles on industry leading sites.

Page Rank

The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. 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 gaining PageRank. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

SEO History

On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses. Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase "search engine optimization" was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Brad Callen, Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their expert opinions in online forums and blogs. Google ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.

SEO Tactics

Linking: sponsored link, link popularity, link farm, nofollow, link exchange, reciprocal link, multiway linking, link exchange network

Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. Another method redirects users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. More noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engines and also appeals to human visitors. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals.

Web Crawlers

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. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

What is Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. The black hat practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders and another version to human visitors is called cloaking. SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results.