Search Engine Optimization
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" "organic" or "algorithmic" search results. SEO can target contextual search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
The most time consuming and difficult web development process, SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors.
SEO, as a marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However, as the search engines are not paid for the traffic they send from organic search, the algorithms used can and do change. There are no guarantees of success, either in the short or long term. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, SEO is often compared to traditional Public Relations (PR), with Pay Per Click advertising closer to traditional advertising. Increased visitors is analogous to increased foot traffic in retail advertising. Increased traffic may be detrimental to success if the site is not prepared to handle the traffic or visitors are generally dissatisfied with what they find. In either case increased traffic does not guarantee increased sales or success.
About SEO Methods
Many web designers view SEO as a “dirty trick,” and with good reason: search engine optimizers often pollute search engine results with spam, making it harder to find relevant information when searching. But in fact, there is more than one type of search-engine optimization. In common usage, black-hat SEO seeks to achieve high rankings in search engines by any means possible, whereas white-hat SEO seeks to code web pages in a way that is friendly to search engines.
IWC Internet will never flood your pages with black hat methods, as these generally tend to turn Search Engine Bots away from your site.
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered "White hat" if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and/or 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 make that content easily accessible to their spiders, rather than game the system. White Hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO uses methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from text that is "hidden", either as text colored similar to the background or in an invisible or left of visible div, or by redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. A method that sends a user to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked is Black hat as a rule. One well known example is Cloaking, the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual review of a site.
We showed up in the search engines before, but it was always beyond the first page. Since using IWC's Search Dominator service, we consistently show up in the top 20. - Kirta Kovaleski, Owner/Designer, Simplicity Gardens Landscaping