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A search on any search engine for a popular keyword yields thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of results. In such a situation, how a website gets itself among the top results of a query for a specific keyword is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Figuring at the top of a web search can attract more traffic for your website, resulting in more business, and that is why SEO has attained such prominence in the past few years.

There are two types of SEO - white hat and black hat. Black hat SEO entails somewhat unaccepted means to get a website to the top of the search rankings. Whereas, white hat SEO works within the framework provided by the search engines and concentrates on making use of widely accepted strategies.

The search engines in the past matched a webpage with the search for a given word by using Meta data, which is generally embedded in the code of a webpage. But, nowadays, a huge proportion of search engines have started using complicated algorithms which assess around two hundred different factors to rank search results.

SEO experts have to be aware of all the latest developments made by search engines and guess the relative weight of different factors in a search algorithm. This knowledge helps them fine-tune the SEO techniques for their clients so that they stay competitive for important keywords. When the search results were exclusively reliant on Meta data and the content of the web page, this task involved optimizing the Meta tags of the web pages and making sure that the keyword density of every page was just appropriate.

Although these factors are crucial even today, the popularity of the web page is now more important as far as the search engines are concerned. The popularity of a specific web page is decided by how many other pages link to it. It is more like a democratic process as every link to the web page can be seen as a vote. Therefore, SEO these days needs substantial work outside the site such as giving away free content in exchange of links to the site and creating presence on blogs and other social mediums online.

You should always remember that SEO is a continuous and dynamic process. This field keeps changing and your techniques must be adapted to the changes. That is the reason why it is so important to engage a seasoned SEO consultant to assist you.