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Any query of a popular word in a search engine would result in a huge number of results. In such a situation, how a website manages to feature among the top results of a query for a specific keyword is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The reason for the increasing 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.

Hundreds of thousands of results will be displayed on searching for a popular topic on any search engine. In this competitive situation, Search Engine Optimization or SEO enables a company to figure among the top search results for a search relating to a particular word. Figuring at the top of a web search means more traffic for your website, resulting in more business, and that is why SEO has gained such popularity in the past few years.

There are two types of SEO - white hat and black hat. Black hat SEO entails somewhat unaccepted means to make a website appear at the top of the search rankings. However, white hat SEO only uses those techniques which are approved of and do not violate the rules of the search engines.

The search engines in the past matched a webpage with the search for a given word by making use of Meta data, which is generally embedded in the code of a webpage. However, these days a significant number of search engines use extremely complex algorithms, entailing the use of more than 200 distinct factors to decide on the results.

SEO consultants constantly try to guess the significance of different factors that play a role in the search algorithms and stay up to date with the advancements that search engines make. This knowledge aids them in improving the SEO strategies for their clients to enable them to appear in top results of popular keywords. When the search results were only dependent on Meta data and the content of the web page, this job involved optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and ensuring that the keyword density of each page was just appropriate.

Although these factors are still quite significant, search engines now give much more priority 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. Each link is therefore seen as a vote for the page and the algorithm becomes democratic in nature. Because of this major change, SEO now also involves several offsite strategies like distributing free content to get embedded links, and developing an external presence through blogs and other types of social media.

You must always remember that SEO is an ongoing and dynamic process. The field is always changing and your techniques have to adjust to those changes. That is why it is so important to have a good SEO consultant by your side.

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