Search engine optimization is the practice of tweaking your website to work with a variety of search engine algorithms and the natural users of your websites to create something that both “floats to the top” in organic searches and that users find easy to find, use, and link to. This is, in some ways, the opposite of SEM, or search engine marketing, which leverages paid inclusion in search engine result sets.
At one point, webmasters were in the habit of “stuffing” websites with keywords, repeating the words that they thought would increase their rankings. As early as 1997 search engines began to rewrite their algorithms to disregard such artificial inflations of rank. Since then, in order to achieve an optimized state for your website it is recommended that website designers make good use of all of the elements of the web page and use human-friendly naming conventions in their page URLs.
In practice, utilizing titles, friendly URLs and the tag will achieve better results in overall search-ability than paid inclusion, which cannot guarantee rank, or keyword loading within the body of a document. Following these guidelines in the development of web pages seems to be good advice.
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I agree with your statement about web designers making good use of all of the elements of the web page and use human-friendly naming in the URLs. In order to make a great website website, you have to take into account all of its functions and of course making it easy to use and navigate.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point in stating that having good titles and easy-to-remember URLs will create more searchable sites that can exceed the of affect of search engine marketing. As you noted, SEO can guarantee rank in a web search query but SEM cannot. SOM is free to implement which makes its value over SEM greater. All it requires is a little more attention to the code of the site and you can have a flourishing site in a manner of no time.
ReplyDeleteI remember the time when websites would stuff keywords into their code in order to gain higher search results. The most random, irrelevant pages would come up simply because someone hid thousands of keywords in their code.
ReplyDeleteI didn't really hear of SEM until reading your post. I've heard of it being done, such as with the sponsored links, but didn't hear of the term. I like that you touched upon it, as a separate technique.
Ya I agree with what some of the others have said above. The mentioning of the SEM was very nice. I have heard of SEM, however forgot about it. In regards to a comparison with SEO, I think this is quite the intriguing match-up. It is an interesting business decision whether you would select to use SEO or SEM to try to better optimize your website on Google. Both offer certain benefits and drawbacks but I know for myself the SEO optimization would certainly benefit you more than the SEM. I am curious though how the rest of users would view this sort of comparison?
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