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In effect, SEO is marketing by
appealing first to machine algorithms to increase search engine
relevance and secondly to human visitors. The term SEO can also refer to
"search engine optimizers", an industry of consultants who carry
out optimization projects on behalf of clients.
A range of strategies and techniques are
employed in SEO, including changes to a site's code (referred to
as "on page factors") and getting links from other sites (referred to as
"off page factors"). These techniques include two broad categories:
techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and
those techniques that search engines do not approve of and
attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.
There is a considerable sized body of practitioners of SEO who
see search engines as just another visitor to a site, and try to
make the site as accessible to those visitors as to any other who would
come to the pages. They often see the white hat/black hat dichotomy as a
false dilemma.
The focus of their work is not
primarily to rank the highest for certain terms in search
engines, but rather to help site owners fulfill the business objectives
of their sites. Indeed, ranking well for a few terms among the many
possibilities does not guarantee more sales.
A successful Internet marketing
campaign may drive organic search results to 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 making sites accessible and usable. |
