Search engine optimization or SEO for short is what people do to make websites and web pages show up better in search engine results. It is about getting more people to visit your website from search results not from ads that you pay for. SEO is used for lots of kinds of searches like when you search for pictures, videos, news stories or scholarly articles.
It even works with search engines and with searches that use artificial intelligence to help you find what you are looking for like search engine optimization does. Search engine optimization is important, for all these types of searches.
Search engine optimization or SEO, for short is something people use when they want to make their website show up near the top of search results. This is part of a plan to market things online. To do this you need to make sure your website is working properly that it has content and that other people think it is a good website.
The main goal of SEO is to get people to visit your website when they are looking for something. This helps people know about your brand. It can get them to interact with you and maybe even buy something from you.
History
People who make websites and people who put things on websites started making their websites work better with search engines in the 1990s. This was when the first search engines were looking at all the websites on the internet. When you used a search engine you would type in the address of a webpage. Then you would get to see what was on that webpage if the search engine already knew about it. Search engines were getting better at finding websites and search engine users were getting more used, to using them to find what they needed on the internet by searching for the websites web address or the URL of a page and the search engine would show them the information found on the webpage if the webpage existed in the search engines list of known websites.
ALIWEB and the first search engines needed people who made websites to send in lists of their websites so that people could find them when they searched. Most of the time these early search engines did not use any way to decide which websites were the most relevant when people searched for something.
The thing that changed this was when computers could automatically look through the internet to find and list websites. This meant that people who made websites wanted to make sure their websites would show up when people searched for things. So they tried to make their websites look good to search engines by using things like tags, which are like special labels that help search engines understand what a website is, about. They did this so that their websites would appear near the top of the list when people searched for things and more people would see them.
The term search engine optimization became popular around 1997. This is what Danny Sullivan said in an article he wrote in 2004. At that time Danny Sullivan was not working for Google. Now he is a Google employee. Danny Sullivan thinks that Bruce Clay, a search engine optimization practitioner was one of the people to use the term search engine optimization. Bruce Clay helped make search engine optimization popular according to Danny Sullivan.
Sometimes the old search methods gave importance to certain HTML attributes. This meant that the people who made websites could use these attributes to get a search ranking. Early as 1997 the search engine providers started changing their methods to stop this from happening. Over time search engines like Google started using ways to figure out what a webpage is really about including the new thing called semantic search. Search engines would use search to understand the purpose of a webpage and give people more relevant results when they search for something, on the internet using search engines.
Search engines like Google and Bing often pay for people to go to meetings about Search Engine Optimization. They also have talks and classes. Big search engines give people information to help them make their websites better.
Google has a program called Sitemaps that helps people who make websites figure out if Google is having trouble looking at their website. Google also gives these people information about how many people visit their website from Google.
Bing has tools for people who make websites too. These tools let people send Bing a map of their website and other information. They can also use these tools to see how often Bing looks at their website and to check if Bing has looked at all the pages, on their website.
In 2015 people found out that Google was working on search and they wanted to make it a big part of the things they were going to make next. This made companies and marketers start thinking about Google search first when they were creating new things. Google mobile search was going to be a deal.
Relationship between SEO and large language models
In the 2020s people started talking about AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. These tools led to discussions about a concept that people call things. Generative engine optimization, answer engine optimization, large language model optimization, artificial intelligence optimization or artificial intelligence search engine optimization. The thing that all these names have in common is that they are all about AI tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.
This way of doing things is about making content better so it can be used in answers that are created by artificial intelligence. The big language models need content to work properly. Because of this people who do marketing, on the internet are talking about how to make content look good how to show that it is trustworthy and how to organize the information so that the content is more likely to be shared.
Relationship between Google and SEO industry
In 1998 two students who were getting their graduate degrees at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made something called “Backrub”. This was a search engine that used a math formula to figure out how important web pages were. The math formula was called PageRank. It looked at how many links were coming into a web page and how strong those links were.
The PageRank number is like a score that shows how likely it is that someone will land on a web page when they are browsing the internet and clicking on links to go from one page to another. Larry Page and Sergey Brin used PageRank to make their search engine better. The PageRank score is still a part of how search engines, like the one Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed work. This means some links are stronger than others. A page with a PageRank is more likely to be found by someone surfing the web. This is because PageRank is important when it comes to links and the web. So a higher PageRank page will be seen by people like the random web surfer, than a page, with a lower PageRank.
Google was started by Page and Brin in 1998. People really liked Google because it was easy to use. The people at Google thought about a lot of things when they decided how to rank websites. They looked at things like PageRank and the links between websites. They also looked at things, on the website itself like how certain words were used and what the headings and links said. This helped Google make sure that websites were not cheating to get a ranking. Google did this because other search engines only looked at the website itself and that was not a good way to do things. PageRank was harder to cheat. People who make websites had already found ways to trick the Inktomi search engine. They used tools and schemes to get rankings. These same methods also worked to cheat PageRank.
Many websites are all about swapping links or buying and selling them. This happens a lot. It is usually, on a really big scale. Some people even make thousands of websites just to spam links to sites.
By the year 2004 search engines like Google and others had started using secret factors in their ranking systems to stop people from manipulating links. The big search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo do not tell people what algorithms they use to rank pages. Some people who do search engine optimization have looked at ways to do it and have given their own thoughts on the matter. You can also learn about search engines by looking at patents related to search engines. In the year 2005 Google started giving each user their personal search results so search results for Google were different, for each person who used Google. Google does this thing where it looks at what people have searched for before. Then it makes results just for them when they are logged in. This is because Google wants to show them things that’re more relevant to what they like. So Google crafted results, for people who are logged in. It is based on their history of previous searches.
In 2007 Google announced that they were going to do something about paid links that help Google PageRank. On June 15 2009 Google said that they had found a way to reduce the effects of Google PageRank sculpting. They did this by using something called the nofollow attribute on links to Google PageRank. Google PageRank is important, to Google. Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google said that Google Bot is not going to treat no follow links the way anymore. This is because some people who do SEO were using no follow to control PageRank.
Now when you use no follow it means that PageRank just disappears. So to get around this the people who do SEO came up with ways to do things. They started using JavaScript to hide the no follow tags, which lets them control PageRank again. Matt Cutts and Google Bot and no follow links are all part of this story, about PageRank. Some people have also come up with a solutions that use iframes, Flash and JavaScript.
- In December 2009 Google announced that it would be using the web search history of all Google users to populate Google search results.
- Google did this to make Google search results better.
- On June 8 2010 Google announced a web indexing system called Google Caffeine.
- Google Caffeine was designed to help Google users find news results and forum posts and other Google content sooner after it was published.
- This meant that Google Caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its Google index.
- The goal of Google Caffeine was to make things show up quicker on Google.
This was a change, for Google and it helped Google users find what they were looking for on Google. Carrie Grimes, the software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google says that Caffeine for Google gives us 50 percent results when we do web searches compared to the old index.
Google Instant is a feature that gives us results in time. It was introduced at the end of 2010. The goal of Google Instant is to give us timely and relevant results.
In the past people who managed websites would spend a lot of time optimizing their websites to improve their search rankings. This could take months or even years.
Now we have media platforms and blogs. Because of this major search engines like Google had to change their algorithms. They wanted to make sure that fresh content could rank high in search results quickly. Caffeine for Google and Google Instant help, with this.
Google made a lot of changes to its search system to make it better. They did this with things, like Panda in 2011 to check the quality of the content and Penguin in 2012 to stop link spam. Then there was Hummingbird in 2013 to help Google understand what people are really asking for when they search for something.. More recently Google came out with BERT in 2019 to get even better at understanding what people mean when they search for things.
These changes show that Google is always working to make its search technology better. Google wants to stop spam and make sure people have an experience when they use Google to search for things. Google is always trying to improve Google search quality.
On May 20 2025 Google announced that Google will make AI Mode available to all users, in the United States. The way Google AI Mode works is that it takes the search query that the user types in and breaks it down into topics. Google calls this the query fan-out technique. This technique generates search queries for the user to look at. Google AI Mode does this to help the user find what they are looking for.
Methods
Getting indexed
This is an example of the Pagerank algorithm. The percentage shows how important each page is thought to be. Pagerank is a way of figuring out how important a page is.
Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo! have tools that look for pages, on the internet. These tools are called crawlers. They use these crawlers to find pages that will show up in their search results.
If a page is linked to another page that the search engine already knows about it will find that page automatically. The people who run the search engine do not need someone to tell them about that page.
There used to be two directories called the Yahoo!. Dmoz. The Yahoo! Directory stopped working in 2014. Dmoz stopped working in 2017. When these directories were working people had to submit their pages to them. A real person would then look at the page to decide if it was good enough to be included in the directory. Google has this thing called Google Search Console. You can make a list of your website pages called an XML Sitemap feed and send it to Google for free. This helps Google find all your pages, the ones that are hard to find just by looking at links on your site. Google also has a place where you can tell them about your website pages.
Some other search engines, like Yahoo! used to have a service where you could pay to have your site looked at. They would look at your site. You would have to pay each time someone clicked on it.. Yahoo! stopped doing this in 2009.
There are tools, like Semrush that can help you understand how people are getting to your site. These tools can show you how many people are coming from ads and how many are coming from search results. They can also tell you how much it costs when someone clicks on an ad and how well your keywords are working. Google Search Console and these tools can really help you with your website and Google Search Console is a place to start.
When search engine crawlers look at a website they consider a lot of things. Search engine crawlers do not look at every page of a website.
The search engine crawlers may also think about how away a page is, from the main directory of the website. This can affect whether or not the search engine crawlers will look at the pages of the website.
Google searches are mostly done on devices. In November 2016 Google made a change to how they look at websites. They started looking at the version of a website first. This means that Google looks at the version of a website before anything else. Google uses this version to decide what to include in their search results. In May 2019 Google updated their crawler to use the version of Chromium, which was version 74 at that time. Google searches are done on devices and Google is always making changes to make it better, for mobile devices. Google said they will keep updating the Chromium rendering engine to the version.
- In December 2019 Google started to update the User-Agent string of their crawler so it shows the Chrome version that their rendering service uses.
- Google did this slowly to give webmasters time to update their code that works with bot User-Agent strings.
- Google did some tests. They felt sure that the change would not cause big problems.
- Google ran these tests. Felt confident that the impact of the Chromium rendering engine updates would be minor, on the Google User-Agent strings.
Preventing crawling
Main article: Robots exclusion standard
To keep stuff out of search results website owners can tell search engine spiders which files or folders to stay away from. They do this by using a file called robots.txt that is placed in the main folder of their website.
Website owners can also stop a search engine from including a page in its database. They can do this by adding an instruction to the page, which is called a meta tag. This meta tag is usually written as .
When a search engine looks at a website it always checks the robots.txt file in the folder first. This file tells the search engine spiders which parts of the website, to crawl and which parts to leave alone. Website owners use the robots.txt file and the meta tag to control what search engines can see on their website the search engine spiders and the search engines database. The robots.txt file is like a set of instructions for robots that search the internet. It tells them which pages they should not look at. Sometimes the search engine crawler will keep a copy of this file so it might still look at pages that the person in charge of the website does not want it to.
The robots.txt file will usually say to stay from pages like shopping carts and other pages that are just for one user, such as the results from a search that the user did on the website. The robots.txt file is important because it helps the person in charge of the website control what the robots can see.
The robots.txt file is used to prevent the robots from crawling pages like the pages that have login information or the pages that have search results from internal searches and the robots.txt file is what tells the robot which pages are, off limits. In March 2007 Google told webmasters that they should stop Google from indexing the results of searches, on their websites. This is because Google considers these pages to be a type of search spam. Google does this to keep Google search results clean.
In 2020 Google stopped using the standard. They made their code available to everyone. Now Google looks at it as a suggestion than something they have to do. To make sure that Google does not include pages, in their search results a robots meta tag needs to be added to each page.
Increasing prominence
There are ways to make a webpage show up higher in search results. For example you can link pages on the website to each other so important pages get more links. This can make the webpage more visible. The way a webpage is designed is also important. If a webpage looks good people will trust the website. Want to stay on it. If people leave a website away it is bad for the website. This is because when people leave a website quickly it affects how credible the website is. The webpage will not be seen as a website if people do not stay on it. This is why webpage design and cross linking between pages of the website are important, for a webpage.
When you write something on the internet it is an idea to use words that people search for a lot. This way more people will see what you have written. You should also update what you have written so that search engines like Google keep coming back to your site. This will make your site more important to them.
You can also add words to the behind the scenes part of your website like the title and the little description that shows up when someone searches for something. This will help people find your site when they search for those words. That means more people will visit your website. Using the keywords in these places will make your site show up higher in the search results, which is really what you want. This is because keywords are important for search engines and for people who are searching for something, on the internet. When we talk about web pages that can be found using URLs it is a good idea to use something called URL canonicalization. This means using a link element or a 301 redirect to make sure that all the links to the different versions of the URL are counted together.
These links are called links and they point to the URL. The incoming links a web page has the more popular it is. This is also known as the pages link popularity score. The link popularity score is important because it affects how credible a website is. URL canonicalization of web pages is helpful in this case as it makes sure that the links, to the versions of the URL all count towards the web pages link popularity score.
White hat versus black hat techniques
This part of the article is old. Needs to be changed. We need to add information to this article so it is current. We should include things that have happened recently or new things we have learned. (September 2025)
Common white-hat methods of search engine optimization
There are two types of SEO techniques. You have the ones that search engine companies, like Google recommend, which are called ” hat” SEO techniques. Then you have the ones that search engine companies do not like which are called ” hat” SEO techniques. Search engines try to stop the ” hat” SEO techniques from working because they think these techniques are cheating. One of the ” hat” SEO techniques is called spamdexing and search engines really do not want people to use it. People who talk about the internet have grouped these ways of doing things and the people who do them into two categories: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. The white hat SEO people usually get results that last, for a long time. On the hand the black hat SEO people think that their websites might get in trouble and be blocked by search engines either for a little while or forever when the search engines figure out what white hat SEO and black hat SEO people are doing to their websites. White hat SEO is a way because it does not try to trick the search engines but black hat SEO tries to cheat and that is why it can get websites into trouble.
Search engine optimization or SEO is a method when it does what the search engines say it should do and does not try to trick people. The rules that search engines have are not a list of things you can and cannot do so it is important to understand what they mean. White hat SEO is not about doing what the search engines say it is also about making sure that the information a search engine looks at and decides is important is the same information that people will see when they look at it. White hat SEO is really, about being honest and making sure that search engines and people see the thing. When it comes to white hat advice the main thing is to create content that people will find useful. This means you are making things for the people who are using the internet not for the search engines. You also need to make sure that the online algorithms can easily find this content. Do not try to trick these algorithms into doing something they are not supposed to do.
White hat SEO is similar, to making websites that’re easy for everyone to use. For example people who are blind or have trouble hearing can still use these websites. This is what we mean by accessibility. Even though white hat SEO and accessibility are related they are not the same thing.
Black hat SEO tries to make websites rank higher in search results by doing things that search engines do not like.
Black hat SEO uses some methods
For example one method is to use text that is the same color as the background of the website or to hide it in a special box that people can not see or to put it somewhere on the page where people can not see it.
Black hat SEO also does something called cloaking, which means it shows a page to people who are visiting the website and to search engines.
There is also something called grey hat SEO, which’s another category that people sometimes talk about.
Black hat SEO and grey hat SEO are different, from types of SEO because they try to trick search engines into ranking websites higher. This is somewhere in the middle of the hat and white hat ways of doing things. The methods that are used do not get the site in trouble. They do not make the best content for the people who use it either. Grey hat SEO is, about making the search engine rankings better.
Search engines do not like it when they find out that a website is using methods to get more visitors. If they do they might make that website show up lower in the search results. They might even remove it from their list of websites altogether. This can happen because of the way the search engine is set up to work on its own or it can happen because a person who works for the search engine looks at the website and decides it is not good.
For example in February 2006 Google removed BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany from its search results because they were doing things that were not honest. Both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany said sorry, for what they did they fixed the pages and then Google put them back in the search results.
Companies that use methods to get ahead can get their clients websites removed from search results.
The Wall Street Journal wrote about a company called Traffic Power back in 2005.
This company was said to have used methods that were not safe and did not tell its clients about the dangers.
Wired magazine said that Traffic Power even took a blogger to court.
This blogger, Aaron Wall had written about what happened to Traffic Power.
Googles Matt Cutts said that Google did indeed remove Traffic Power and some of its clients from search results.
Traffic Power got in trouble for using these methods and Google took action, against Traffic Power and its clients.
As marketing strategy
Digital marketing has a lot of ways to reach people and one of these ways is SEO. There are ways too like paying for ads when people click on them and using social media to market things.
Search engine marketing or SEM for short is when you make and run ads on search engines. You have to keep making these ads so they work well.
The big difference between SEO and SEM is that one is free and the other you have to pay for. SEM is more about being seen than being the match, for what people are looking for.
People who make websites should really care about SEM because it helps them get seen. Most people only look at the few results when they search for something so it is very important to be one of those. A good internet marketing plan also needs to have web pages that people like and want to look at. These web pages should be made to get people to do something. You also need to set up programs to see how well your website is doing. This helps the people who own the website know what is working and what is not. It is also important to make your website better at getting people to do what you want them to do like buying something. Internet marketing is about getting people to your website and internet users to do something. Internet marketing and internet users are very important, to the success of your website.
In November 2015 Google released a 160-page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public, which showed that Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines are now focused on how useful Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines are and also on mobile local search, for Google. The mobile market has really taken off in the few years. It is now more popular, than using desktops. This is what StatCounter found out in October 2016. They looked at 2.5 million websites. Saw that mobile devices loaded 51.3% of the pages.
Google is one of the companies that is using the fact that mobile devicesre so popular. They want websites to use Google Search Console and the Mobile-Friendly Test. The Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool that allows companies to see how their website looks in search engine results. It also helps them figure out how easy it is for people to use their website. Google is using the Mobile-Friendly Test to help companies make their websites better on devices. The closer the keywords are to each other the better the ranking of the keywords will be. This is because the ranking of the keywords is based on the terms. The keywords and the key terms are very important, for the ranking of the keywords.
Search engine optimization may give a business a return on investment.. The thing is, search engines do not pay for organic search traffic. The algorithms they use can change at any time.. There is no promise that people will keep visiting a website.
Search engine optimization is what we are talking about here. Search engines can change their algorithms. This can affect a websites ranking on search engines. This can result in a loss of traffic, to the website. A business that relies much on traffic from search engines can suffer big losses if search engines stop sending people to their website. Search engines and their algorithms are what matter here. Googles CEO, Eric Schmidt said that in 2010 Google made over 500 changes to its algorithm. That is one and a half changes every day.
Google made these changes to its algorithm. This can be a problem for websites.
Industry people think that these changes to Googles algorithm can hurt websites. They can lose a lot of traffic.
Websites need to be easy to use for people. This is called user web accessibility. It is very important, for Search Engine Optimization. Googles algorithm changes can affect this.
International markets and SEO
The way we optimize things for search engines is really specific to the search engines in the area we are looking at. The amount of people using each search engine is different in places and so is the competition. Google is the search engine in most places but the exact percentage of people using it varies. In places outside of the United States Google is usually more popular. Data from 2007 shows that Google was the number one search engine in the world. For example in Germany Google was used by 85 to 90 percent of people as of 2006. Google is still the search engine in most areas and its market share is really high, in many places, including Germany where Google had a big lead. Google is really popular in Germany it has a part of the market about 89.85% as of March 2024.
Google also has a market share in the United Kingdom it is about 93.61% as of March 2024. Google is used by people in the United Kingdom and Google is also used by most people, in Germany.
To do search engine optimization for countries you need to do more than just translate your website. Search engine optimization for markets is very important. You also need to get a domain name that’s specific to the country you want to target, like a country-code top-level domain or a top-level domain that is relevant to the people you want to reach.
You should choose a web hosting service that has an IP address or a server in that country.
This will help your website load faster for people in that country.
Using a Content Delivery Network is also an idea because it helps your website work better all around the world.
Search engine optimization for markets requires a lot of work including getting the right domain name and web hosting and using a Content Delivery Network to make your website fast and reliable, for people everywhere. You need to understand the culture so that the content feels relevant to the audience. The content should be something that the audience can relate to. To do this you have to do keyword research for each market. You also have to use hreflang tags to target the languages.. You have to build local backlinks. But here is the thing the core SEO principles are the same everywhere. This means you have to create high-quality content. You have to make the user experience better.. You have to build links. The core SEO principles, like creating high-quality content and building links are the same, for every language and every region.
Regional search engines are really big in areas. They have a presence, in specific markets:
China is a place where Baidu’s really popular. Baidu leads the market in China. It controls a big part of it around 70 to 80 percent of the market share.
South Korea: Since the end of 2021 Naver, which is a web portal in South Korea has become really popular in the country. Naver is a deal now, in South Korea.
Russia has a search engine that people use a lot. It is called Yandex. Yandex is the popular search engine in Russia. As of December 2023 Yandex was used by a lot of people it had least 63.8 percent of the market for search engines, in Russia.
Multilingual SEO
By the early 2000s, businesses recognized that the web and search engines could help them reach global audiences. As a result, the need for multilingual SEO emerged.In the early years of international SEO development, simple translation was seen as sufficient. However, over time, it became clear that localization and transcreation—adapting content to local language, culture, and emotional resonance—were more effective than basic translation.
