Search Engines and SEO
The World Wide Web wasn’t very old before the first search engines started offering their services. They listed web pages, ranked according to predetermined criteria, for popularity. The ranking of the pages was an ever fluid process, reflecting the ever changing nature of the pages themselves.
Wikipedia describes search engines like this:
“A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload.”
Before long webmasters realized that they could influence the ranking of a web page by creating it with the elements that the search engines were looking for, and having those elements in the right place, and in the right density, if appropriate. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, was born.
It’s probably true to say that the search engines view SEO with mixed feelings. On the one hand webmasters are giving the search engines what they are looking for, but on the other hand webmasters are manipulating the pages in order to predict an expected result.
Increasingly, the search engines are looking for more naturally constructed pages. If a page is created around a certain keyword, and that keyword occurs 5% of the time on the page, including in the title and the first H1 tag, etc, then it becomes too artificial.
The search engines don’t seem to like a stilted, artificial situation, so they are beginning to look for naturally created pages on a theme where the keyword will naturally (without counting) occur a certain number of times. But other related keywords will be expected to appear too, as well as synonyms. This is considered a more natural way of constructing a web page.
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