Search Engines and SEO companies, A Match Made in Heaven?

The relationship between these two often opposing sides of the same business is a complex one. In recent years, search engines have offered webmasters tools to check how their pages are performing, as incentives to work with, not against them. Yahoo offers a program which guarantees early search engine indexing, for a fee, and others only take manual submissions, which hampers the automated fee-based los angeles seo expert companies While Google and others want to encourage good SEO practices by sending representative to SEO conferences, the bad guys, or “Black Hatters” as they are known in the trade, still cause many problems for them. A forum for discussion between the two parties was opened in 2005, with the establishing of AIRWeb, the Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. This body met every year to look for solutions to control the black hatters, who, drawn by the potentially huge amounts of money to be made by offering high page ranks were resorting to more destructive techniques, disrupting the activity of search engines.

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Common SEO Techniques

These include both “White Hat” and “Black Hat” methods of gaining a high page rank.

The first relies on a well designed page with carefully chosen keywords, and the second is a mix of techniques that can result in the banning of a page from search results. White Hat SEO practices are planned to steadily gain views over the long term, by quality of content, while Black Hatters are mainly concerned with a fast spike in customers, knowing that the search engines will catch up with them, eventually. Another area, harder to define, as the methods could be said to belong to either of the above categories, is so-called” Gray Hat’ SEO technique.

White Hat SEO Methods

The “Good guys” of the SEO world keep within the guidelines issued by search engines, and exclude deceptive practices by keeping the content of their pages relevant to any chosen keywords, meta tags and titles. Since search engines ignore pages that are over stuffed with keywords, the sparing use and precise choice of them is an art form. Typical texts contains the most important keyword in the main title, the first paragraph, perhaps once or twice more in the general body of the text, then at the end or in the last paragraph. Recent research on how viewers look at web pages gives some very useful information to those engaged in good SEO work. It was found that customers tend to look at the page of search results in a certain order, from top to bottom and from left to right. Since search engines have introduced paid advertisements which are typically displayed to the left of the returned search results, webmasters combine their SEO skills with buying space on pages showing their sites, and so increasing visitors. Webmasters use this same information when placing content on the site itself, as part of small business seo services. They also ensure the websites provide useful information to the viewers, rather than just targeting the spiders from search engines, which produces some almost unreadable text and worse customer reviews.

Black Hat SEO Methods

These include anything the search engines feel is not fair game to improve page rankings. Quite creative in the variety and scope of their activities, Black Hat SEOs know their activities they may lead to a client’s site getting banned by search engines, and may not disclose their methods to unsuspecting customers who only find out the facts when page views drop from amongst the top sites viewed to zero. Examples of their methods ar found in pages with text that is invisible to the eye, hidden in colored areas, but are seen by the tools search engines send out to get information. This may add to the overall keyword density of the page, or have some currently trending topics secretly embedded in the site, producing totally irrelevant search results. Some recent scandals, such as those involving BMW and Ricoh, two German companies that Google banned, showed that not only small, but also large, well-respected companies could become involved with Black Hat SEO methods. In both instances the pages were corrected and Google reinstated them.

Gray Hat SEO Methods

This involves some methods that are frowned upon by search engines, but not as strictly as the Black Hatter’s activities. These techniques involve buying links, second page poaching and some creative use of content. They manage to escape notice as questionable sites by appearing to be authentic. One example could be the inclusion of customer reviews that are actually really cleverly worded adverts, so when carefully scrutinized; the same keywords found in the main text will be seen. The trading of links for money is not appreciated by Google, Yahoo and its fellow search engines. Bad SEO practices involve creating “Link Farms” that involve pages linking back to each other in a loop, creating a false sense of web presence. Webmasters can also create a number of very similar sites, all with the same content, which link to each other, usually on separate domains, to attempt to fool search engines into accepting them each as an individual and independent entity. Yet another method used by bad SEO webmasters takes records of domains whose ownership will expire soon, waits for the sale to be advertised, and then uses their already established popularity to insert different content of his own choosing.

SEO as a Tool

Companies advertising on the internet have a far smaller chance of getting higher page ranks now that all so many businesses use SEO practices. At its best, it is a useful tool to present any website in the most appealing way to viewers. As a source of extra traffic, it may be somewhat over rated, as experts in the business have observed the majority of views come from links to other popular websites. Another factor to take into consideration is the ability of search engines to change the configuration of their algorithms, meaning a site that gained heavy traffic from searches one week, may not have the correct SEO to maintain that level after adjustments are made in search terms.

Choosing a SEO Company

As the choice could result in either a nice boost in page rank, or being banned from search engine’s results, the decision is one that needs to be carefully made after good research. The reputation and web presence of a company can be at stake from shady SEO webmasters who collect their fees and vanish mysteriously by the time the victims learn their trust was misplaced, if they have used Black Hat methods and been caught by the search engines. Good firms, on the other hand, can take a website from boring to booming by utilizing such tools as keyword research to better target customers, content development to capitalize on the strengths of any product or service, and add their technical expertise in areas like coding, to produce results that reflect better on the company as a whole. Questions that any prospective seo expert los angeles company should be happy to answer include finding out which guidelines they follow, since Google, Yahoo and other search engines keep lists of methods they condone, and those they will ban sites for using. Asking to see websites the firm has completed work on is a good guide to the quality of their SEO abilities.

The Future of SEO

Google has won the race to be the top search engine, with over 75% of searches on the internet carried out via its engine. This may not last as the next generation of search engines is already emerging. Wolfram Alpha is only the first that aim to provide a totally different way to search the internet, and Microsoft’s Bing has re-configured to reenter the market. All these changes will also affect the way search engine optimisation agency is carried out.

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