How SEO Works

A search engine domesticates information the way ranchers domesticate animals. The information is periodically rounded up, branded, checked for disease and confined for future use. There are now about a quarter billion web sites on the Internet, and they’re growing by more than 80,000 new sites every day. Search engine optimization (SEO) is how people find your site in this electronic wilderness. It’s the cowbell of the Internet. Search engines and SEOs are co-evolving Internet services. When one becomes more sophisticated, the other follows. Knowing search engines and why SEO works is important to any web site owner. The earliest search engines focused on keywords that a searcher entered. The next generation used programs called “web crawlers” or “bots” to search web pages and create indexes of them that give the search engine a proprietary resource similar to index cards in a library. They analyze a page’s content and copy pages into a cache in their own data banks where they can be uploaded to you more easily.
The crawlers and searches targeted both the text on a page and the keywords in which web page designers describe a page in codes hidden from view. Each web page has a “title tag” and a “meta tag” that give a guide to the content, again similar to the list in a library index card that tells all the subjects under which a particular book is listed. The title tag and meta tag is what directs a search for “macaroni and cheese recipe” to your recipe site and not a rock group or software program with that name. Another step, by the founders of Google, ranked web pages by the number of other pages that had links to it. The idea was that if other authoritative sites valued a site enough to link to it, then that was a “vote” by the Internet community in the value of the page.
The relationship between search engines and SEO is volatile. SEOs can be an aid to search engines, but search providers like Google and Yahoo! are vigilant against questionable tactics. An SEO can pack meta tags with keywords that don’t reflect the real content of a page, or it can create a “doorway” page packed with deceptive keywords that automatically leads a visitor on to the client’s true website. Another trick is for an SEO firm to design a client’s web site so that there are many links to other web sites maintained by other clients and employees, raising the ranking in search engines like Backrub. A good web site design seeks out mutually beneficial links with other sites, but does not pack a site with meaningless or hidden links just to attempt fooling SEOs into a higher ranking.
In the industry, a SEO strategy that works cooperatively with search engines is called a “white hat” SEO, while one that uses deceptive practices is a “black hat” SEO. A black hat SEO risks having its clients blocked by search engines. SEO reporting tools will tell you which way your SEO tends to fall. A first step in SEO is having a good web site that serves both your needs and the needs of visitors. The content should be free of repetition and clear in writing and design. The intent and message of the site should be clear. You want to attract visitors, not fool them into coming for a brief visit. Another valid way to build SEO ranking is to combine a web page with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Social media does not replace a web site, it enhances it.