Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results. The earlier a site is presented, the higher its rank, in the search results the more the searchers will visit that site. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevancy, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO practices may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure. With SEO practices it is possible to get your site noticed by large search engines and increase flow to your web page from users searching terms relevant to your site’s content. There are many different components that will help get web traffic to your site a few being

Why SEO

Search Engine Optimization allows web sites to have better rankings on the major search engines out there. The three main search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s Live, this is where the SEO providers direct the majority of their attention to gaining the highest ranks. Search Engine Optimization is only really necessary when the success of your business depends on how many people see and arrive at your web site. This is most often the case for E-Commerce sites, and businesses that rely on their web site for advertisement. It should be noted now that there is a way to buy your way to the top of most search engines by participating in their ad programs. For instance Google’s adwords program has you pay per user that comes from their search engine’s ads section. This is essentially paid advertising, if this sounds like something your company would be interested please mention it to one of our General Web Tech employees and we will get you set up with advertising your site in this manner.

The Evolution of Search Engines

First of all it is helpful to explain how a search engines began, when the web was still young “web indexers” would simply take submissions of web addresses, catalog the content, and search the pages that were listed in links from that page. This process involves a search engine spider or robot (the program / tool used to get the page’s content) downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, thus the battle between SEO companies and search engines began. The SEO companies often want to be ranked the highest for as many different searches as possible, where as the search engines want to have the most relevant links to each specific sear ch appear on their pages. This healthy competition has led to the large business of Search Engine Optimization to keep pages ranked high for the most relevant searches to their client’s sites.

How SEO Works

SEO involves several key factors that the large search engines take into account when they look for relevant pages. These factors are continuously changing and so too must the SEO providers change their practices to match the search engines. The following is an example of one of these constantly changing factors: search engines rely heavily on how well connected your site is with the rest of the web (how many links on other people’s pages point to your web site). Therefore when the SEO providers learned about this they then started to set up "link farms", which were essentially sites set up for the sole purpose of having links on them to point to their clients’ sites, in order to raise their clients’ rankings. This then led to a changing of the search engine practices which led to different rules, which in turn led to the SEO providers devising different ways to boost the rankings of their clients.