Search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a part of search engine marketing and can be defined as the whole of activities intended to make a webpage score high in the organic search results of a search engine,

on the relevant keywords, keyword combination ( s) casu quo search term (s). Since an entry in those organic results is free, these search results are an interesting alternative to search engine advertising.

In addition to the SEO guidelines referred to by Google (technology permitted by Google that has been given the predicate «white hat SEO») linklifting.com, some websites try to influence the search results of search engines to their advantage by using unauthorized methods. The use of such methods is popularly referred to as «black hat SEO». A well-known method is placing keywords in the same color as the background color of the website so that website users do not see those keywords but web crawlers do. These methods sometimes work for a short period, until they are widely used. Then the makers of search engines invent methods to counter this kind of unwanted optimization methods. Nowadays, makers of search engines oppose such unwanted tricks, where websites can even be removed from the index of the search engine.

Google indicates that actively collecting backlinks (buying links or exchanging links for search engine optimization purposes) is considered black hat SEO. The bottom line is that only (but not all) on-page SEO is white hat and almost all off-page SEO black hat.