Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.
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.
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.
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.
Increasing prominence
A variety of other methods are employed to get a webpage shown up at the search 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.[35] Linking from other websites, including link farming and comment spam. However, link spamming can also have a bad impact on your search result position.
§ Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries.[36] 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.
White hat vs Black hat
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.[38] 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.[39]
A search engine optimization technique is considered white hat SEO if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. We can say the legal SEO is a white hat SEO. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.
Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application ofcrowdsourcing.[citation needed] Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.
Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked.
