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Search engine optimization is a way of utilizing keywords and hidden code to attract millions of visitors to your web content and get rich quick. In reality, this means earning a day or two’s beer money over the course of two or three years. At the heart of this problem is there are really only three ‘top three slots’ returned in any given internet search, and an endless pool of people competing for them.

Software robots, otherwise know as ‘crawlers’ or ‘spiders’, are deployed by search engines to evaluate websites and their individual pages. They go at it day in, day out, analyzing as many pages as they can. One of the characteristics they are interested in is a website’s accessibility. Sites that are easy to navigate are given a higher ranking. When a website is added to a search engine’s database, this is called ‘indexing’.

Another task of the crawler is to return useful information to the user. Someone enters a search term, or keyword, and the bot provides them with a list of potential websites for them to visit to find what they are looking for. They also take into account the presence of both inbound and outbound links. This feature is at the heart of article spinning.

Stuffing your content with as many keywords as it will hold is a bad strategy. The search engines have been wise to this tactic for some time. Perhaps a better way of making sure you reach the top is to pay for the space. However, the caveat here is that the public may be turned off by the fact that these results were paid for. Their eye is automatically drawn down the page to the organic content. Some businesses like to combine social strategies with paid and organic links.

Successful SEO relies on the presence of keywords in five distinct parts of a web page. These are the title, the meta keywords, meta description, first level header and the content. The keywords are the only words that should appear in all five of these parts. Obviously, you want to have more than just the keywords in any of these elements, but the same phrase should not appear in any other part.

Meta elements are included in the coding to assist the search engines in categorizing sites accurately. While these words appear in the HTML, they may not necessarily be visible to the visitor. They may be revealed by instructing the browser to display code. Repeating keywords in these five sections reassures the crawlers that your content adheres to the given them. You will be rewarded with a better ranking. The trick is to be sure to restrict any extra words to just one of the five sections.

SEO techniques may be broadly categorized as either ‘white hat’ or ‘black hat’. White hat techniques conform to the guidelines produced by the search engines and do not attempt to deceive. One method of deception is to ‘hide’ text by assigning it the same color as the background. Another ‘black hat’ technique is called cloaking. This is the practice of returning a different page to a human user than it does if the page is being requested by a search engine.

Search engines are very strict with black hat techniques and their use can result in either a reduction in ranking or being left out of the search engine’s database altogether. This happened to two high profile companies in Germany in 2006. Both companies rectified the errors and were subsequently restored to the database.

Responding to the question “What is SEO?” is simple when you look at the right Net information. Those who want to understand ‘how to SEO‘ should begin with an knowledge of the basic techniques and methods.