Hundreds of thousands of results will be displayed on searching for a popular topic on any search engine. In such a situation, how a website manages to feature among the topmost results of a query for a specific keyword is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The reason for the growing popularity of SEO in last few years is that the appearance of the website in top search results aids in attracting more visitors to it, which very often translates into more business.

Black hat and white hat are the two primary categories of SEO techniques. Black hat SEO entails somewhat unethical ways to get a website to the top of the search rankings. On the other hand, white hat SEO works within the guidelines provided by the search engines and focuses on using widely accepted strategies.

In order to understand the relevance of a web page for a particular keyword, search engines conventionally used the page’s Meta data, which is inscribed into the code of the page by webmasters. But, these days, most search engines have started using complicated algorithms which evaluate over two hundred distinct factors to rank search results.

SEO specialists try to find out the relevance of various components in the search algorithms and stay in touch with the newest modifications that are introduced by different search engines. On the basis of these findings, they enhance the SEO methods used by their clients so that their websites stay competitive. For the earlier algorithms, which used only the Meta data and web site content, the optimization method used was to bring the desnity of a keyword on the page to an appropriate level and managing the Meta tags of the page.

Although these aspects are still quite important, search engines now give a lot more weight to the popularity of a web page. The popularity of a web page is estimated based on the number of links to it from other web pages. It is almost like a democratic process as every link to the web page can be treated as a vote. Because of this, now SEO has to focus on offsite techniques as well, such as offering content for free to get inbound links and developing a presence on online hubs for social interaction, such as blogs, forums etc.

The most crucial factor to keep in mind about SEO is that it is quite dynamic. The field is constantly changing and your techniques have to adapt to those changes. That is why it is so critical to have a good SEO consultant help you out.