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About SEO
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
SEO refers to the processes carried out with the objective of making a website appear higher up the rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing. Broadly speaking, it refers to four types of activity:
- on-site activity: changing the content (including technical coding changes) of the website which you want to appear in the search engine
- off-site linking: getting links to your website from other websites
- social media: setting up blogs and pages on twitter, facebook, youtube and other social media websites which link to your website. Also potentially encouraging real people to engage with your social media webpages.
Generally SEO refers to increasing your ranking in the unpaid search results. The term SEM (search engine marketing) includes paid for search results such as Google Adwords.
SEO Companies charge a fee for advice and for carrying out SEO activities. They may charge an agreed fee for a set of activities or they may charge for work by the hour to an agreed limited. They may be paid based on results although they can be hesitant to do so, and this can lead to black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO refers to SEO methods which may radically increase a websites search rankings in the short term (during which time the SEO Company may be paid) but in the long term may lead to the website being banned from the search engine. They include methods such as:
- link farms - the practice of setting up a large number of websites which all link to each over to give the artificial impression that they are all popular website
- keyword stuffing - the practice of repeating key words over and over again on a webpage and in the webpage code
- article spinning - the practice of taking an article and rewriting it a number of times (either using cheap labour or using a computer) so it can be posted on lots of different websites without appearing to duplicate the same information on different websites.