Technically speaking, search engine optimization is the process of influencing the visibility of a web page against a search query, in a search engine.

Different business functions define SEO from different perspectives. Business people view it as either Organic or Paid SEO. On the other hand, techies differentiate it on the basis of the purpose being solved. For instance, image search, local search, video search, news search and industry-specific search.

SEO involves activities across multiple aspects of a website, for instance, content, HTML and associated coding. The purpose is to increase their relevance with respect to specific search terms. This becomes importance because every website has its own relevance and business objective. So in this process we need to focus more on the website domain, targeted audience, demographic areas and business goals.

How the SEO Industry came into being

Search engine optimization industry works in the landscape provided by search engines. Let’s explore the history of the growth of the search engine optimization industry.

If we categorise the search engine history into generations, it will look like this:

First generation search engines: AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek

Ranking based on Content – Pure Information Retrieval

Users started spamming by keyword stuffing (eg., by adding keywords, text to increase content similarity).

Second generation search engines: Lycos

Ranking based on Content + Structure – Site Popularity

A hyperlink from a page on a site X to some page on site Y is considered a popularity vote from site X to site Y. This led to users spamming using ‘Link Farms’.

Third generation search engines: Google, Teoma, Yahoo

Ranking based on Content + Structure + Value – Page Reputation

Page reputation or ‘Page Rank‘ of a page serves as the algorithm behind the search engine function.

Users try to spam these search engines as well, using ‘link farms’, key word stuffing, and other means. But, Google keeps updating its algorithms consistently, to facilitate better user experience. This has left people with no choice but to align all the search engine optimization activities to Google’s guidelines. This gave rise to the search engine optimization industry.

Like Google, all the other search engines promote their own algorithmic processes to crawl and index the web pages over the web. All of them want the users to follow their algorithms for better visibility or search results.

SEO – Follow The Rules

Generally Peoples says that it is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine. While we all know that the search engines are always tends to change their algorithms & other factors involving into them.  So after spending two years in this era, I found that it’s not about what we just putting the url’s in the directories or put elsewhere in the other platforms while it’s all about the follow the rules – 

Here is the starter guide of search engine optimization directly from the Google –

www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

This is the first officially published documents by google for the search engine optimizer.

Now as i told that spending two years in this area what i learned is like –

SEO have two parts mainly – On-Page &  Off-page

Now On-page involving with the factors upon the site like  – Meta-Tag (Title, Description, Keywords),  Alt-tag,  Heading tags, robots.txt, xml-sitemap & blaw blaw….:)

And                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Off-Page involves – Directory submission, Article submission, Social bookmarking, Blog commenting, Link building (One way, Two way & Three way 😉 etc.

Now after the Panda & Penguin (Google Algorithm Update) I really understand that it’s not about what we just doing with closed of our eyes actually this is all about quality content & well-defined structure with follow the rules & guidelines….