What is SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is popularly known is the science or should we say the art of optimizing a website's content to make the website more visible on search engine results. It is often termed as the organic or unpaid approach to making websites search-engine friendly. The primary aim of SEO is to attract more users to the website and generally the more often and higher a website appears in a search engine's results, the more users it attracts.
As stated earlier, SEO is the organic or unpaid approach, which means that there is also a paid or inorganic approach to growing the user base of a website. The latter is done by paying search engines to obtain a guarantee from them that the website will definitely appear in the results that their search generates for the suggested keywords.
But we will confine ourselves to SEO which is not only our main topic of discussion but also a more relied upon strategy in search engine marketing. After all who would pay for a mere guarantee to appear in search engine results, when there's no guarantee of how high it would rank in the search results. If you are on page 10 of the results, you can bid goodbye to your chances of high visibility.
Therefore SEO is extremely important for high visibility of a website on search engine results, which today account for a large pie of the mindshare and wallet share of the end consumer of various products. According to a survey by survey expert Etailing in 2010, 57% of respondents started their research on a product or service through a search query. While that number may have definitely increased since due to growing Internet penetration, it is a synch that 57% of your potential market today can be accessed through search engines. There's no gainsaying the fact that SEO is extremely important to organizations' marketing strategies today.
Now that we have established the importance of SEO, let us consider the key methods adopted in optimizing a website for search engines. It basically involves editing the content and at times the HTML code to incorporate certain keywords preferred by the target audience while searching in a particular context. For example a website selling women's fashion accessories will have to incorporate keywords that women most often use to search for these products.
SEO also involves removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engine bots, or computer programs, which search engines use to scan the content of a webpage and index it for generating results.
Since search engines have started granting prominence to the number of links that a webpage has, cross-linking has also become an important SEO strategy. Cross-linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages can result in the website ranking higher in relevant results of a search engine query.
Remember however, that search engines have complex algorithms that can easily detect invalid links or links that are merely there to fool search engines into granting a website a higher search rank. Therefore this approach which search engine giant terms 'link farming' should be avoided in an ideal SEO approach.
SEO Providers and Search Engines – Adversaries or Collaborators
On the flip side, SEO providers can also use tactics which are disapproved of by search engine providers and are tantamount to defrauding them. Search engine optimizers are much sought after as they have the expertise in optimizing a website for a search engine, which has assumed heightened importance due to its marketing potential. Not everyone has the required SEO skills and it is also not the core business of many organizations engaged in selling their products and services. Therefore we have a scenario where SEO is completely outsourced to third party providers, who charge a premium for such services and then try to obtain results for their clients by hook or by crook.
This black hat approach in the past gave rise to numerous underhand tactics such as link farming, spamdexing, Sybil attacks, page hijacking etc which were employed by SEO providers to fool search engines into granting their clients higher ranking in search results. This resulted in completely irrelevant results appearing in search engine results generated for each query, leading to loss of faith among users in the respective search engine.
In 2005 for instance, Las Vegas-based SEO provider Traffic Power was reported by the media for using spamdexing techniques that violated Google's webmaster guidelines. Google investigated and later banned some of Traffic Power's clients from organic search results.
Recognizing such inappropriate tactics detrimental to the Internet industry as a whole, an annual conference Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb) was created in 2005 by industry practitioners. The conference was aimed at addressing the threat posed by aggressive content providers and nipping nefarious SEO activity in the bud. It was also in principle aimed at addressing the possible adversarial angle to Search engine-SEO provider relationship and making it more collaborative and beneficial in nature.
Search engine providers have since developed more complex algorithms that are able to see through such underhand tactics, but black hat practitioners like most wrong-doers in other domains have a knack of keeping up as well. Methods such as cloaking, using hidden text, doorway pages and redirects are more recent adaptations by the black hat SEO community to work around the tools created by search engines for detecting fraudulent SEO tactics. Doorway pages for instance are added to a website to target a specific key word phrase or phrases. They add little value to a visitor and may in fact be hidden from the user's view, appearing only to the search engine's web crawler.
Redirects are accomplices to doorway pages and automatically navigate users away from such useless pages so that they may not be seen by users.
There's no intent here to paint all SEO providers with the same brush; indeed there's an overwhelming majority who use white hat SEO tactics to the benefit of both clients and the search engine industry. But there are also those practicing black hat SEO in considerable numbers, who have tarnished the industry's image.
Black Hat and White Hat SEO – The Different Hats SEO Providers Wear
Search Engine Optimizers or SEO providers as they are popularly known resort to two different approaches to search engine optimization. Firstly, the valid approach, which is recommended by search engines as part of good design and secondly the undesirable approach that resorts to SEO in ways that are deemed inappropriate and fraudulent by search engines. While SEO providers adopting the valid approach are said to be using white hat methods, those adopting the fraudulent approach are termed as doffing the ‘black hat’.
Recognizing the difference between white hat and black hat approaches to optimization is no rocket science. White hat tactics basically involve conforming to search engine guidelines and not resorting to deception to attain higher search engine ranking. In this approach, the webmaster concentrates on incorporating content which is useful to the target audience and subsequently making it easy for search engine programs to easily access this content. The content offered to search engine programs for analysis in this approach is the same as that offered to end users and there is no masking or cloaking of content.
Black Hat on the contrary adopts cloaking as one of its key deception tactics to inveigle search engines into granting its website a higher search ranking. Text that is hidden by having the same color as its background or positioned off screen is used to generate favorable results. This text which is invisible to the target audience can incorporate dynamic content, which keeps changing keywords and context merely to attract search engines into ranking it high due to purported relevance to millions of keywords.
These and other tactics fall within the purview of what is termed as ‘spamdexing’ or as search engines term them ‘search spam’ or ‘search engine poisoning’. Using hundreds of extraneous terms so that search engines will recognize them as legitimate addresses, forms part of this black hat SEO tactic. Another spamdexing technique is the calculated stuffing of content with certain keywords
For example the operator of a ‘get rich quick’ scheme website may incorporate hidden text that appeals to Hollywood movie fans. Search engines in their earlier avatars were not able to recognize such deception and ranked such websites high due to their relevance to Hollywood related searches.
Modern search engines however have developed the capability to detect such keyword stuffing and separate the wheat from the chaff by identifying which pages are actually valid and which ones are merely resorting to black hat SEO tactics.
There are other tactics followed by black hat practitioners that include creating link-building software, Sybil attacks, spam blogs, page hijacking etc. While the term link-building software is self-explanatory, Sybil attacks involve creating multiple websites at different domain names that all link to each other solely with the aim of defrauding search engines into granting them a high search engine ranking.
Page hijacking is another highly malicious black hat tactic that uses clones of popular and legitimate websites to show content similar to the original to the web crawler, but inveigle users into unrelated sites.