What is SEO?

Hundreds of thousands of results will appear before the user on searching for a popular topic on any search engine. In this situation, the techniques which allow a company to be displayed in the first few results for a query using a specific word is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Figuring at the top of a web search can attract more traffic for your website, leading to more business, and that is why SEO has attained such prominence in the last few years.

There are two types of SEO - white hat and black hat. The tools applied in black hat SEO for ensuring a place for the website in the top results are not seen as ethical. Whereas, white hat SEO works within the framework provided by the search engines and focuses on using widely accepted techniques.

In order to understand the significance of a web page for a specific keyword, search engines conventionally used the page's Meta data, which is inscribed into the code of the page by website managers or developers. However, these days a significant number of search engines make use of extremely complex algorithms, involving the use of more than 200 distinct parameters to come up with the results.

SEO professionals have to keep track of all the new developments made by search engines and find out the relative weight of different factors in a search algorithm. This knowledge helps them fine-tune the SEO strategies for their clients so that they remain competitive for selected keywords. For the older algorithms, which used just the Meta data and web site content, the optimization method used was to bring the concentration of a keyword on the page to a proper level and dealing with the Meta tags of the page.

Despite the continued importance of the onsite aspects, the search engines now put much more emphasis on how popular a page is. The popularity of a particular web page is determined by how many other pages link to it. This method is democratic in nature, where each link is like a vote for the particular web page. Due to this significant change, SEO now also entails several offsite tactics like distributing free content to get inbound links, and creating an external presence through blogs and other forms of social media.

The most important factor to remember about SEO is that it is not static. This field keeps evolving and your methods should be adapted to the changes. This is what makes using the services of an expert SEO consultant so critical.

Learn more about the available SEO Singapore and SEO Trainings.