How often a website appears in a search online is the short and sweet definition of search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. The original direction for SEOs was to be organic in nature. This means, visibility for websites could be achieved without paying for the position. Today, this is still the tug of war for SEO purists.
The initial working plan for the SEO was basic and worked just like a user’s thinking. The keywords found in websites were used to predict the searches a user would try by typing in the keyword. This method went along for a while until webmasters began to understand how search engines selected one site over another listing when performing ranks.
The secret of how to put a business in a high page rank position was discovered. The consultants recognized they could get their clients to the top of the hill (so to speak) and charge a fee to put them there. The new found optimization techniques flooded the market a bit faster than SEO rules could be established to save the original SEO plan.
The creative workarounds to optimizing query engines were born that featured abuse and manipulation of page ranking by masters of the web. Word stuffing pages with keywords was easy for webmasters. The response to keyword stuffing by search engines was to create more mind-bending algorithms. Algorithms became more complicated and the webmaster could not so easily exploit the optimization of search engines.
Keyword stuffing is also called black hat SEO. The term black hat SEO might also be known as spamdexing. Black hating and spamdexing both weaken the original plan for search optimization rankings. Some consultants even write that these methods have affected the caliber of the user’s search experience. This is why algorithms have been written to detect and slow down spamdexing and other abuse by deleting them from their indices.
The paradox of SEO rankings is this: the way a user might search or link to get to a website is not the same method used internally by the search query engine. Most search engines use “crawlers” to find sites and also rank them. Sites are found by crawlers that use algorithms. These algorithms look for the more popular websites in a much different way than the human mind logically searches.
The web “crawlers” rank a page of a website using the assumption that an internet surfer will eventually reach an intended page after randomly going from one link to the next. This fact is implicit following the web crawler design; some links are stronger because of a higher page rank. Because of a higher rank, a random person is most likely to find his way to the ranking website page eventually, in the virtual mind of the search engine.
In conclusion, the SEO of today has a design to confound the eyes of clever webmasters longing to break the code for search engine optimization. Instead, complicated algorithms have been written to determine page rank. Web crawlers are used to achieve the ranking in a way not natural to the logical search. The large search engine companies are taking back their organic way of doing searches using web crawlers.
