SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” a business strategy for ensuring a website’s high ranking in search engine results. This increases website traffic and, in many cases, revenue for the related company. An SEO expert is someone who has been trained to help with this process. There are numerous techniques for improving search engine optimization, the majority of which are ethical, but some of which are not. SEO stands for “search engine optimizer,” which is another name for an SEO expert.
In the late 1980s, the Internet, which was originally intended for academic and government use, began to expand into commercial activity. The rapid growth of web pages in the early 1990s prompted the creation of the first search engines, websites dedicated to locating specific pages for Internet users. The sheer volume of web traffic soon caused even search engine results to become excessively long. Software engineers devised methods for bringing websites to the top of these result pages, thereincreasing traffic to them. The term “search engine optimization” was coined in 1997 and quickly gained popularity.
Googleintroduction ®’s in 1998 revolutionized the search engine process, posing new challenges for SEO professionals. Instead of looking for related words and phrases in the websites themselves, Googleproprietary ®’s software ranks them according to their relevance to a given search phrase. SEO professionals had to rework their methods because previous SEO techniques focused on these phrases, known as keywords. Google® and other search engines guarded their software’s calculations, or algorithms, with zeal. Search engines eventually began collaborating with SEO firms, providing guidelines and best practices, though specific algorithms remain a trade secret.
To improve a website’s ranking in a search engine, an SEO expert employs a variety of techniques. Keywords, as well as other elements of a page’s content and its code (the programming used to design the page), are still important. Simple marketing techniques are used in some methods, such as determining which search engines people are most likely to use. Internet users’ habits are also important: what they search for and how they are likely to phrase their searches. Increasing the number of sites that link to a specific site gives it more weight in search engine results pages.
The behavior of SEO professionals is governed a code of ethics. Those who follow these ethics are referred to as “white hats” in the SEO industry, while those who use unethical practices are referred to as “black hats.” Hats were sometimes used to distinguish heroes from villains in fight scenes in old Hollywood Westerns, and the terms refer to that. Deceptive page and code design, as well as unfairly manipulating search algorithms (a practice known as “spamdexing”), are examples of unethical behavior. These techniques may produce the desired effect for a short time, but they will almost always result in search engines banning not only the website, but also the SEO professional or company involved.