Fontmark offer affordable SEO ( search engine optimisation ). We cant guarantee page
1, but will do everything legally possible to get you there, and have achieve such
rankings with other company's.
To find out how we can optimise your website, and help achieve google presence, complete
the request quote to the right.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality
of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic")
search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list,
the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different
kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical
search engines. This gives a web site web presence.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what
people search for. Optimising a website primarily involves editing its content and
HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers
to the indexing activities of search engines.
The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by
an industry of consultants who carry out optimisation projects on behalf of clients,
and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may
offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign.
Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO
tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search
engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management
systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such
as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results
and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ
these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.
Getting indexed
The leading search engines such as Google 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. Some
search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee
crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee
inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search
results. Yahoo's paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and
competitors. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project
both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster
Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure
that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically
following links.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a
site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the
root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled
History
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the
mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially,
all a webmaster needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various
engines which would send a spider 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, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information
about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well
as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then
placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and
visible 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 optimisation probably came into use in 1997.
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. But using meta data to index pages was found to be
less than reliable because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could
potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate,
incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank
for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes
within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.
By relying so much 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. Since the success and
popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant
results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn 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.
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.[5] 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
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.[6] Off-page factors
(such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors
(such as keyword frequency, meta tags[citation needed], 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 focused 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. In recent years major
search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age,
sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further
refine results.[citation needed]
By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their
ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks
sites using more than 200 different signals. The three leading search engines, Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank
pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen,
have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published
their opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO practitioners may also study patents
held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.
Relationship with search engines
By 1997 search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well
in their search engines, 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 Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent
webmasters from manipulating rankings.
Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for
an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference,
AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss and
minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
SEO 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, chats, and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid
inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimisation
community. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site
optimisation. 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. Google guidelines are a list of suggested practices Google has provided
as guidance to webmasters. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to
submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information.
Methods
Getting indexed
The leading search engines, such as Google 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. Some
search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee
crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee
inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search
results.[27] Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project
both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster
Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure
that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically
following links.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a
site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the
root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
Preventing crawling
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's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. 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 crawled. 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.
Increasing prominence
A variety of other methods are employed to get a webpage shown up in the searchs
results. These include:
Cross linking between pages of the same website. Giving more links to main pages
of the website, to increase PageRank used by search engines. Linking from other websites,
including link farming and comment spam.
Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant
to a wide variety of search queries.Adding relevant keywords to a web page meta tags,
including keyword stuffing.
URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the "canonical"
meta tag.
SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search
engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines
do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter,
among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods,
and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.
White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate
that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once
the search engines discover what they are doing.
An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines
and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series
of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO
is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a
search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search
engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than
attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in
many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two
are not identical.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the
search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden,
either as text coloured similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned
off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is
being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by
reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether.
Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms,
or by a manual site review. Infamous examples are the February 2006 Google removal
of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. and the April
2006 removal of the PPC Agency BigMouthMedia. All three companies, however, quickly
apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.
Many Web applications employ back-end systems that dynamically modify page content
(both visible and meta-data) and are designed to increase page relevance to search
engines based upon how past visitors reached the original page. This dynamic search
engine optimisation and tuning process can be (and has been) abused by criminals
in the past. Exploitation of Web applications that dynamically alter themselves can
be poisoned.
As a marketing strategy
Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top
to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant
result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number
of searchers who will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not
guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website,
and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on
the site operator's goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic
traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search
engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade,
addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing
those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their
successes, and improving a site's conversion rate.
SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for
organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued
referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily
on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending
visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate
themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org[48]
has suggested, "Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share
of their traffic from search engines." Instead, their main sources of traffic are
links from other websites.
International markets
A Baidu search results page Optimisation techniques are highly tuned to the dominant
search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from
market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google
represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google's
share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as
of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany. While there were
hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany.
As of June 2008, the marketshare of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to
Hitwise.That market share is achieved in a number of countries.
