Many techniques that are now considered black hat SEO used to be perfectly legitimate, but some people abused these methods and caused problems for others on the Internet.
SEO is short for “search engine optimization,” a business technique for ensuring that a website ranks well in search engine results. This increases traffic to the website and often the revenue of the related business. An SEO professional is a person trained to facilitate this process. There are numerous techniques to increase search engine optimization, most of them ethical, but some less so. SEO can also mean “search engine optimizer,” another name for an SEO professional.
An SEO professional uses a variety of methods to raise a website in search engine rankings.
The Internet, originally designed for academic and government use, expanded into commercial activity in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, the explosive growth of web pages resulted in the first search engines, sites designed specifically to locate specific pages for Internet users. Soon, the sheer volume of web traffic made even search engine results too long. Software engineers have developed ways to place websites at the top of these results pages, increasing traffic to those websites. The phrase “search engine optimization” was first used in 1997 and soon became a big currency.
The arrival of Google® in 1998 changed the search engine process and brought new challenges to the SEO professional. Google’s proprietary software essentially ranks websites according to their relevance to a particular search phrase, rather than searching for related words and phrases on the websites themselves. Since SEO techniques at the time focused on these phrases, called keywords, SEO professionals had to rework their methods. Google® and other similar search engines have closely guarded the calculations or algorithms used by their software. Eventually, search engines began working with SEO companies, providing guidance and best practices, although the specific algorithms are still trade secrets.
The SEO professional uses a variety of methods to raise a website in search engine rankings. Keywords remain important, as do other elements of a page’s content and its code, the programming used to design the page. Some methods involve simple marketing, like knowing which search engines people are likely to use. Internet user habits are also vital: what people are searching for and how they are likely to search. Increasing the number of sites linking to a particular site also adds weight to its display on search engine pages.
There is a code of ethics that guides the conduct of the SEO professional. In the SEO trade, those who follow this ethic are called “white hats” while those who use unethical practices are called “black hats.” The terms refer to old Hollywood westerns, where hats were sometimes used to distinguish heroes from villains in fight scenes. Unethical behavior includes misleading page and code design and unfair manipulation of search algorithms, a practice called “spamdexing.” These techniques can quickly create the desired effect, but usually result in search engines banning not only the website, but also the related SEO professional or company.