Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital digital marketing strategy used to enhance the visibility and ranking of a website or a web page in search engine results pages (SERPs). By optimizing a website for search engines, businesses can increase organic traffic, which refers to visitors coming from unpaid search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.
The foundation of SEO involves understanding how search engines work. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use algorithms to crawl the web, index content, and rank pages based on what the algorithm deems most relevant to users’ search queries. SEO tactics can be divided into two broad categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of elements on a website that can be directly controlled by the site owner. This includes content elements like the quality and freshness of content, the presence of targeted keywords, and the optimization of meta tags and images. It also involves technical aspects such as site performance, mobile-friendliness, and site architecture.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, focuses on boosting the website’s reputation and authority by fostering relationships with other websites. This includes strategies like link building, where reputable sites link back to your website, and social media engagement, which can indirectly affect your site’s position in search results.
Both types of SEO require regular monitoring and adjustment as search engine algorithms are constantly updated. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can provide insights into how well a site is performing and identify potential areas for improvement.
Ultimately, SEO is about making your website more user-friendly and providing value that meets or exceeds what visitors are searching for. This not only pleases search engines but also improves user engagement, which in turn can lead to higher conversions, increased brand awareness, and loyalty.
Benefits of Exclusive SEO Service Provider
Introduction
What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the art and science of enhancing website visibility and user engagement through organic search engine results. It involves a multitude of strategies and practices aimed at improving rankings, driving traffic, and increasing awareness.
Why Exclusive Contracts Matter
Exclusive contracts in SEO confer a level of trust and commitment between provider and client that is unmatched in standard agreements. This exclusivity not only secures a stable financial footing but also enables deeper strategy alignment and tailored services.
Benefits of Being an Exclusive SEO Provider
Enhanced Brand Recognition
Content
As an exclusive provider, your brand stands out not just to your client but within the market at large. This differentiation can lead to increased business opportunities and a reputation as a premier service provider.
Access to Premium Clientele
Exclusive agreements often come with the promise of working with premium clients, including large corporations and high-value startups, which can significantly boost your company's portfolio and credibility.
Predictable Revenue Streams
The predictability of revenue from exclusive contracts allows for better financial planning and investment in growth initiatives. It stabilizes cash flows and supports sustained business development.
Long-term Strategic Partnerships
These contracts foster long-term relationships, providing the time and context needed for implementing impactful SEO strategies that produce measurable results over time.
Implementing Effective SEO Strategies
Understanding Client Needs
An essential first step in any SEO campaign is to deeply understand the client's business, goals, and market challenges. This understanding directs all subsequent SEO efforts and strategy developments.
Customized SEO Approaches
Every client deserves a strategy tailored to their specific circumstances and objectives. Exclusive contracts allow for the crafting of bespoke strategies that align closely with the client's long-term business trajectory.
Continuous Improvement and Reporting
Ongoing analysis and refinement ensure that SEO strategies evolve with changing market conditions and continue to deliver high value. Regular reporting keeps clients informed and engaged in the process.
Case Study 1: Small Business Success
A detailed account of how an exclusive SEO partnership enabled a small business to dominate local search results and significantly increase their customer base.
Case Study 2: E-commerce Growth
This case study outlines the strategies that led to a triple-digit growth rate in online sales for an e-commerce client over two years.
Case Study 3: B2B Lead Generation
Exploration of a B2B company's successful implementation of SEO strategies that resulted in a 50% increase in qualified leads.
Case Study 4: International Expansion
How SEO played a critical role in a company's successful expansion into new international markets, enhancing global reach and local relevance.
Case Study 5: Reviving a Failing Brand
An in-depth look at how strategic SEO interventions helped turn around the fortunes of a struggling brand, revitalizing its market presence and sales.
Conclusion
Summary of Benefits
Being the exclusive SEO service provider offers unparalleled advantages, from securing lucrative contracts to driving significant business growth through strategic SEO practices. These benefits highlight the importance of exclusive partnerships in the competitive digital marketing landscape.
FAQs
FAQ 1
What makes exclusive SEO contracts so valuable?
FAQ 2
How does exclusivity affect the SEO strategies implemented?
FAQ 3
Can small companies benefit from offering exclusive SEO services?
FAQ 4
What are the risks associated with exclusive SEO contracts?
FAQ 5
How can a company transition to offering exclusive SEO services?
Benefits of Exclusive SEO Service Provider
Introduction
In the digital age, securing an exclusive SEO service contract can dramatically reshape a company's online presence. This article explores the myriad benefits that come with being the sole SEO provider for a client, offering a closer look at the competitive advantages and strategic gains.
What is SEO?
|
Social Signals and their Impact
Although indirect, social signals like shares and likes can enhance SEO by increasing visibility and traffic to your site.
An in-depth look at how an e-commerce site improved its SEO through strategic keyword placement and link-building campaigns.
Agency life provides a fast-paced environment where you can work on diverse projects, dealing with various industries and SEO challenges, which accelerates learning and skill acquisition.
Freelancing or establishing your own client base allows you to apply SEO knowledge practically, building a portfolio that can showcase your expertise to potential employers or clients.
Certifications and degrees from reputed institutions can provide credibility and a detailed understanding of advanced SEO tactics, making you a competitive candidate in the job market.
Can SEO expertise be self-taught, or is formal education preferable?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the backbone of successful digital marketing. By understanding how SEO works, businesses can significantly enhance their online visibility and user engagement. This article demystifies the core components and practices of SEO.
SEO is the process of optimizing a website to improve its rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This involves various strategies that help search engines find, index, and rank the site more effectively.Integrating keywords into your content naturally helps search engines understand what your page is about. This should be done thoughtfully to avoid keyword stuffing, which can negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Search engines prioritize sites that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Techniques such as optimizing image sizes and leveraging browser caching can significantly improve site speed.
Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is crucial as more users access the internet via mobile devices. This means implementing responsive design to provide a seamless experience across all devices.
Building Inbound Links
Quality inbound links from reputable websites signal to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy, which can enhance your site's authority and rankings.
While social media doesn't directly contribute to SEO rankings, it can amplify your content's reach and generate traffic to your site, indirectly benefiting your SEO efforts.
Integrating SEO with social media marketing can increase content visibility and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Including optimized content in your emails can lead to increased engagement and direct traffic to specific parts of your website.
SEO Ahwatukee
What is SEO and how does it work? | Digital Marketing Institute
New to SEO? Looking for higher rankings and traffic through Search Engine Optimization? The Beginner's Guide to SEO has been read over 10 million times.
Beginner's Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Moz
What is SEO and how does it work? | Digital Marketing Institute
Search engine optimization - Wikipedia
What is an SEO expert? | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers
Checking your browser - reCAPTCHA
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Explained
What is SEO? | Mailchimp
New to SEO? Looking for higher rankings and traffic through Search Engine Optimization? The Beginner's Guide to SEO has been read over 10 million times.
You may have heard of Search Engine Optimization or SEO but are not sure how to use it to drive leads and sales. Read on to find out exactly what SEO is and how to use it effectively.
For over 50 years, SEO has been an innovator in education, mentorship, positive peer pressure, high standards, and networks to turn untapped potential into newfound
Many SEO experts, agencies, and consultants provide useful services for website owners. Check out our guide to hiring an SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's the process of improving a website's visibility in search engines to get more traffic.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which helps your page rank higher on Google and other search engines to drive more traffic to your site.
The Beginner's Guide to SEO
Introduction
What is SEO and how does it work?
SEO Scholars
SEO Career
SEO Alternative Investments
SEO Law
Do you need an SEO?
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization Explained
What is SEO?
The basics of search engine optimization
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
What are the three pillars of SEO?
Paid search vs. organic search - the differences and similarities
How do search engines actually work?
How does Google order and rank search results?
What is an SEO strategy?
Why is SEO important?
The role of SEO
You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts.
This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.
The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is also widely available on the web, including in guides like this! (Woohoo!)
Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can't achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs are met first. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.
Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it "Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs."
As you can see, the foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility, and moves up from there.
We'll spend time on each of these areas throughout this guide, but we wanted to introduce it here because it offers a look at how we structured the guide as a whole.Explore the chapters:
Go from zero to hero with our step-by-step refresh on the core fundamentals for setting your site up for SEO success.
For true beginners. Learn what search engine optimization is, why it matters, and all the need-to-know basics to start yourself off right. Download your free Quick Start Worksheet.
If search engines literally can't find you, none of the rest of your work matters. This chapter shows you how their robots crawl the Internet to find your site and add it to their indexes.
Our approach targets users first because that's what search engines reward. This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking.
This is a hefty chapter, covering optimized design, user experience, information architecture, and all the ways you can adjust how you publish content to maximize its visibility and resonance with your audience.
By implementing responsive design, robot directives, and other technical elements like structured data and meta tags, you can tell Google (a robot itself) what your site is all about. This helps it rank for the right things.
Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers.
Once you've got everything in place, it's time to expand your influence by earning attention and links from other sites and influencers.
An essential part of SEO is knowing what's working (and what isn't), adjusting your approach as you go along.
Learning SEO can sometimes feel like learning another language, with all the jargon and industry terms you're expected to know. This chapter-by-chapter glossary will help you get a handle on all the new words.
If you're serious about improving search traffic we do recommend reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO front-to-back. We've tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals.
Go through at the pace that suits you best, and be sure to take note of the dozens of resources we link to throughout the chapters — they're also worthy of your attention.
If you want to take a more guided approach to learning SEO or training your entire team, check out the Moz Academy SEO Essentials Certification. We've consolidated all the resources you need to learn SEO fundamentals alongside unique learning methods, task lessons and quizzes to test your knowledge. You can also display your knowledge with your Linkedin Moz SEO Essentials certification badge.
Getting excited yet? You should be! Without further ado, let's launch into Chapter 0: Quick Start Guide.
Are you at the start of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) journey? Maybe you’ve heard that SEO can help drive traffic to your website and get you higher rankings on search engines.
We’re here to remove any confusion or complications around SEO - with some insight on how artificial intelligence fits into the picture. Once you understand the fundamentals, you can learn how to leverage SEO to drive traffic and generate quality leads.
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position in search results pages (SERPs). Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
There’s a great graphic created by Rand Fiskin, co-founder of Moz, that takes from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs’ pyramid. Fishkin’s ‘Mozlow's Hierarchy of SEO Needs’ looks at how people should execute SEO.
Top tip: SEO is no longer confined to search engines like Google or Bing. It’s also important for social networks such as YouTube and TikTok as people turn to social media to find information.
Top tip: SEO is no longer confined to search engines like Google or Bing. It’s also important for social networks such as YouTube and TikTok as people turn to social media to find information.
As a digital marketer, knowing how to get your brand, website, or company found by searchers is a core skill, and understanding how SEO is evolving will keep you at the top of your game.
While SEO changes frequently in small ways, its key principles do not. We can break SEO into three core components or pillars that you need to be familiar with – and action regularly:
Technical Optimization: Technical Optimization is the process of completing activities on your site that are designed to improve SEO but are not related to content. It often happens behind the scenes. A simple example of technical optimization is submitting your sitemap to Google.
On-Page Optimization: On-Page Optimization is the process of ensuring the content on your site is relevant and provides a great user experience. It includes targeting the right keywords within your content and can be done through a content management system like WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, or Shopify.
Off-Page Optimization: Off-Page Optimization is the process of enhancing your site’s search engine rankings through activities outside of the site. This is largely driven by high-quality backlinks, which help to build the site’s reputation.
From the outset, it’s important that you understand the differences and similarities between the organic, natural search synonymous with SEO and paid search.
The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine results pages, and organic results appear beneath them.
Here’s an example from searching ‘best water bottle’. The paid ads or sponsored posts come up as images while the organic results are below it.
Be aware that the arrival of Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) is changing display advertising all the time using AI. So it’s important to keep on top of developments for your SEO activities.
Another key difference between paid and organic search is time. With paid search, you can get results quickly whereas, with organic search, results take more time - often weeks, months, and even years. So you have to play the medium to long-term game with organic search.
As the name suggests, you pay for paid search traffic, with pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
What that means is, you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. So instead of relying on organic traffic to your website, you buy traffic for your page by paying Google to show your ad when your visitor searches for your keyword.
For organic search, traffic is free, although it does require an investment of both resources and time.
In terms of the return on investment (ROI), it's much easier to measure paid search. That's partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics (GA4).
When it comes to traffic share, research from BrightEdge found that organic search is responsible for 53% of all site traffic compared to paid at 15%. So the lion’s share of clicks are actually on the organic results.
Keyword research: You use a search engine for both paid and organic search, and both require a user to enter a keyword. So you need to do keyword research for organic search and paid search.
Landing pages: Both types of search require you to create great landing pages. For SEO, the landing page needs to be connected to your website. For paid search, it can be the exact same landing page you use for organic, or it can be a completely separate stand-alone page that sits on your website.
Traffic: Generating traffic is a major goal of both paid and organic search. Most importantly, both paid and organic search traffic include user intent. That is, someone is asking Google a question or searching for information – they are in an active mindset and as a result they are more likely to take action once they find this information.
Search engine algorithms are computer programmes that look for clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for. Search engines rely on algorithms to find web pages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword. Remember there’s also social media algorithms to consider for search.
The first step is crawling. Search engines send out web crawlers to find new pages and record information about them. We sometimes call these web crawlers ‘spiders’,‘robots’ or Googlebots.
Their purpose is to discover new web pages that exist, and to periodically check the content on pages they’ve previously visited to see whether they've changed or been updated.
Search engines crawl web pages by following links they’ve already discovered. So if you have a blog and it's linked from your homepage, when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link and may follow the link to your new blog post.
The second step is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine decides whether or not it is going to use the content that it has crawled. If a crawled web page is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will be added to its index.
This index is used at the final ranking stage. When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database where it can later be retrieved. Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index. A web page might not be placed in the index if:
Top tip: You can check your indexed pages by typing ‘site:yourdomain.com’ in the search bar (see our example below). This will show you the pages showing up on Google. For a more detailed report you can look at the ‘Index Coverage report’ in Google Search Console.
The third step is really the most important, and that is ranking. Ranking can only happen after the crawling and indexing steps are complete. So once a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, your site can be ranked.
There are more than 200 ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content, and they all fit under the three pillars of SEO: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.
There are more than 200 ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content, and they all fit under the three pillars of SEO: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.
If you're looking for agency support in the areas of SEO, content marketing and paid media, get in touch with Neil Patel Digital
Google has a collection of algorithms such as Hummingbird, Panda and RankBrain that are responsible for deciding how to order and rank search engine results.
For ranking, you should also consider Google’s EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework which may not be a ranking factor but it’s a component of its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
Top tip: Other technologies to consider are Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) and the AI-chatbot Google Bard (now called Gemini).
A good SEO strategy is to optimize your website to improve user experience and satisfaction, and try to get the most out of the RankBrain ranking factor.
Like anything in digital marketing, you need a strategy to help implement, track and tweak to be successful. It’s the same for your SEO.
An SEO strategy is focused on optimizing your content to get ranked as high as possible on search engines - preferably page or position #1. Its goal is to boost organic traffic so you get found by your target personas.
Top tip: If you’re a small business or one operating in a specific area, then local SEO is an important element to bake into your strategy. It will help you get found by people in your area.
Setting SEO objectives is a vital part of any SEO strategy. It is important to set SEO objectives – and align them with your overall business objectives as:
While it can feel like a time-consuming task to set objectives, measuring them can help you make progress with your SEO in the long term. So what metrics should you measure to track performance?
When setting objectives and KPIs it’s important to be realistic. If you’re starting from nothing - i.e. you’re only starting to use SEO properly - then be modest in your figures but also have ambition.
If you have already been using SEO and seeing results, be more aggressive with your targets but base them on existing data. Setting unrealistic percentages will only bring disappointment.
Here are three examples of SEO objectives that can be used as a guide to setting relevant objectives for your own business or website:
If your business is transactional and you have an e-commerce element, you’ll want to set your objectives around tracking sales and lead conversions. However, if you're a non-ecommerce commercial site, you’ll want to focus on lead generation.
If your business is informational, you are more likely to set objectives focusing on brand awareness or website traffic.
Remember, even when you have fully implemented your SEO strategy, SEO is never finished. With SEO, you may need to change tactics midway through, play a long game, and wait to see the end results. But with a solid SEO foundation in place – and a little patience – the benefits of your SEO strategy should become apparent, leading to a better user experience for customers and more conversions for your business.
Now that you know what SEO is and how to use it, would you like a career in the area? If the answer is yes, then you’re in luck. Not only is it a skill that’s in high demand by companies across industries but you can also make a healthy living from it.
Sagefrog's recent report found that SEO is a top marketing tactic, with nearly half of B2B companies using it in their marketing strategy, while companies plan to allocate 31% of their budgets to SEO in the coming year.
Companies rely on organic traffic to increase online visibility and when it works, they enjoy the rewards of SEO as a low-cost strategy.
As well as these hard, or technical skills, you also need to consider your ‘soft skills’, such as critical thinking, communication, and teamwork.
The salary of an SEO expert can depend on where they work: freelance, agency, or in-house. It will also depend on the level of experience and time spent doing SEO effectively.
Luckily, there are loads of great resources and tools out there to help with your SEO activities. Some have free plans and others are paid, so it’s about finding what’s best for you.
Artificial intelligence is already used to optimize many areas of SEO. From using tools to help with keyword research and content generation to getting AI-driven insights and user intent intel.
Artificial intelligence is already used to optimize many areas of SEO. From using tools to help with keyword research and content generation to getting AI-driven insights and user intent intel.
SEO done well can reap huge rewards for marketers and businesses. Our Professional Diploma in Search Marketing with Neil Patel will help you understand search fundamentals and explore key areas like optimizing SEO, paid search campaigns, search strategy, search analytics, demand generation and much more. Reserve your place today!
SEO done well can reap huge rewards for marketers and businesses. Our Professional Diploma in Search Marketing with Neil Patel will help you understand search fundamentals and explore key areas like optimizing SEO, paid search campaigns, search strategy, search analytics, demand generation and much more. Reserve your place today!
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
For 60 years, SEO has been an innovator in education, mentorship, peer-to-peer support, high standards, and networks to turn untapped potential into newfound greatness.We are creating an ecosystem of excellence, and propelling human potential.
Helps transform hundreds of underserved public high school students into confident college graduates.
Helps students secure coveted internships on Wall Street and at fortune companies, and set them up for future career success.
Helps students secure coveted internships on Wall Street and at fortune companies, and set them up for future career success.
Helps underserved, future lawyers thrive in law school and excel in their careers through our Catalyst and Fellowship program initiatives.
Helps underserved, future lawyers thrive in law school and excel in their careers through our Catalyst and Fellowship program initiatives.
Provides education, exposure, training, and mentorship opportunities in the sector to high-achieving professionals.
Some are underserved students with dreams of college graduation. Others are high-achieving young professionals seeking support in their fields.All are hungry for opportunity.
SEO’s network of more than 13,000+ alumni spans 46 U.S. states and 48 countries, and their career track record is historic.
SEO’s network of more than 13,000+ alumni spans 46 U.S. states and 48 countries, and their career track record is historic.
Unlimited access to the Virtual Awards Dinner experience Newsletter, website, and social media recognition.
Unlimited access to the Virtual Awards Dinner experience Newsletter, website, and social media recognition
Like many Americans, we at SEO are outraged by the blatant disregard for the lives of Black Americans by police and others, including those who summon police on Black people engaging in everyday, noncriminal activities.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters only needed to submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines, which would send a web crawler to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server. A second program, known as an indexer, extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Website owners recognized the value of a high ranking and visibility in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term.
Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using metadata to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Flawed data in meta tags, such as those that were inaccurate or incomplete, created the potential for pages to be mischaracterized in irrelevant searches.[dubious – discuss] Web content providers also manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines. By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engine and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.
By heavily relying on factors such as keyword density, which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals. Since the success and popularity of a search engine are determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.
Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the "crawl rate", and track the web pages index status.
In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.
In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "Backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.
By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization and have shared their personal opinions. Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines. In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users.
In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat any no follow links, in the same way, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As a result of this change, the usage of nofollow led to evaporation of PageRank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash, and JavaScript.
In December 2009, Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results. On June 8, 2010 a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts, and other content much sooner after publishing than before, Google Caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its index in order to make things show up quicker on Google than before. According to Carrie Grimes, the software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index..." Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs, the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.
In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google implemented a new system that punishes sites whose content is not unique. The 2012 Google Penguin attempted to penalize websites that used manipulative techniques to improve their rankings on the search engine. Although Google Penguin has been presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it really focuses on spammy links by gauging the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under the newly recognized term of "conversational search", where the system pays more attention to each word in the query in order to better match the pages to the meaning of the query rather than a few words. With regards to the changes made to search engine optimization, for content publishers and writers, Hummingbird is intended to resolve issues by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors.
In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google implemented a new system that punishes sites whose content is not unique. The 2012 Google Penguin attempted to penalize websites that used manipulative techniques to improve their rankings on the search engine. Although Google Penguin has been presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it really focuses on spammy links by gauging the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under the newly recognized term of "conversational search", where the system pays more attention to each word in the query in order to better match the pages to the meaning of the query rather than a few words. With regards to the changes made to search engine optimization, for content publishers and writers, Hummingbird is intended to resolve issues by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors.
In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in the US. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time in order to better understand the search queries of their users. In terms of search engine optimization, BERT intended to connect users more easily to relevant content and increase the quality of traffic coming to websites that are ranking in the Search Engine Results Page.
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. The Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ, two major directories which closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both required manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Search Console, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links in addition to their URL submission console. Yahoo! formerly operated a paid submission service that guaranteed to crawl for a cost per click; however, this practice was discontinued in 2009.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
Mobile devices are used for the majority of Google searches. In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way they are crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index. In May 2019, Google updated the rendering engine of their crawler to be the latest version of Chromium (74 at the time of the announcement). Google indicated that they would regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version. In December 2019, Google began updating the User-Agent string of their crawler to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay was to allow webmasters time to update their code that responded to particular bot User-Agent strings. Google ran evaluations and felt confident the impact would be minor.
To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine"noindex"> ). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish to crawl. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login-specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam. In 2020, Google sunsetted the standard (and open-sourced their code) and now treats it as a hint not a directive. To adequately ensure that pages are not indexed, a page-level robot's meta tag should be included.