Consider the case of Mr. X who decides to increase his company’s brand presence and consumer awareness over the net. So, he gets a web site made for this very purpose. But then, nobody knows about this little development that has occurred. As a result of this, the website gets lost into the oblivion of a massive search engine like Google. Hence, what Mr. X’s website needs is a visibility boost. This is where a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can utilize various aspects of the search and rank parameters of the engine to boost the presence of Mr. X’s website. This means manipulation of the website characteristics in order to search optimize it.
The first and most basic technique is website structuring. A well structured website will have simpler codes making it easy for search engine spiders to index and rank it. So, start by applying headers and sub headers. Avoid using Flash images as they can get confusing for search engine crawlers. Instead, try ALT tagging your images. Also, if your website uses dynamic web pages, then remove any session IDs as they do no good to your site ranking. Another area of significance is titling and Meta Links. Meta Tags are the lifeline of any SEO manipulation as they give info on keywords and page summary. So, if you have a proper title for each page along with organized, specific and tight content in small paragraphs, then they turn into effective Meta Data. Also, if you could have different Meta Data for different pages, then that would amp the indexing for every single web page.
Another manipulation technique is acquisition of inbound links. Now, every time you combine your website link to other social sites, they produce special links to your web pages that directly land a visitor onto that page. These are known as Back links also. When back links are generated from respectable sources, they enjoy higher rankings due to the popularity of the link generating site. As a result, these extra links give your website some very appreciable traffic (visitors). ‘Link farming’ is a manipulation method through which you buy links for your site from other places. The fact is that somebody else has already established a bunch of well ranked back links. All you do is buy link(s) from the party and combine them to your website. While the concept of back links remains the same, the manner of directly acquiring a well indexed back link without having to work for it is the only difference.
Then there is a more devious manipulation method called ‘cloaking’, that presents one page to the search engine and another to the visitor. By doing so, you are either cheating the search engine or the visitor. Either ways, this risky and unnecessary method yields higher rankings in certain cases. Nevertheless, good content, clear code and great back links are all that you need for an effective SEO. While optimization should be the goal of any website builder, he/she should try and refrain from over optimizing as it could lead to serious consequences.