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Define SEO

Updated on April 27, 2012

The term "SEO" is used frequently by people promising to deliver traffic to a website. SEO is considered one of the most important factors that determines if a website gains traffic or is lost in the crowd. But what is SEO? As a way to define SEO, consider this analogy. Suppose a business owner opens a new store in a mall, but the mall has millions of stores and numerous stores sell the same thing as this business owner's store. The business owner must attract customers to visit the store as well as provide the items that the buyer is looking for. To use this analogy to define SEO, think of SEO as the ways to attract customers to the store and how the items in the store match the expectations of those customers.

Though many people may provide an SEO definition as an acronym for search engine optimization. The most common search engine optimization methods include backlinks to the website pages, using keywords, and including the keywords in the meta information, URL, and title of the website page. The goal of these and other SEO practices are to raise the website's rank among the search engine results. By using SEO, people are more likely to see the website when they use Google or another search engine to find information related to the website.

Google and other search engines have ways of ranking websites in importance and relevance to the search being performed. SEO experts learn the methods Google uses to rank websites, so that they can add those characteristics to their websites. The number and quality of backlinks that a webpage has affects the importance that Google places on that website. A backlink is simply a link on another website that leads to the webpage in order to get more traffic for that webpage.

Some SEO experts use SEO tactics that Google does not like. The shady tactics are sometimes referred to as black hat SEO. One common black hat SEO is to use invisible text on the webpage that contains keywords for which people might search. Another thing some people do is to use keywords to try to get traffic to their page, but the keywords are not related to what is on the page. If Google finds that a website is using black hat SEO tactics, Google may penalize or ban the website.

Though a website owner can help their rank and thus improve the website's visibility in search engine results by doing some SEO basics, Google is constantly changing how they rank websites. When Google changes the algorithms that determine the importance a webpage is given in the results, many webmasters are left scrambling to try to change their SEO strategies to get back to where the website was in the ranking. Using a professional service like SEO Hyderabad can help the websites search engine optimization to stay current.

Unfortunately, some people continue to use black hat SEO tactics. These tactics may improve the website's ranking until detected by Google. It can be very difficult to gain notoriety with Google after such a loss. For website owners who use Google AdSense for revenue, black hat SEO strategies can cause Google to ban that account. Therefore, when implementing SEO or hiring a company to handle the SEO strategy, the website owner needs to make sure that only reputable SEO methods.

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