SEO-Term Project 2-Hagman.docx - Search Engine Optimization...

Search Engine Optimization
Veikko Hagman
Digital Marketing
Term Project 2
Instructor: Dale Fodness
Date: 27.3.2018
Aalto University
School of Business
Bachelor´s Program in International Business
Mikkeli Campus

Section A: Search Engine Optimization – Improving the website to gain a better
ranking
Search Engine Optimization (also known as SEO) is the process of improving the
different characteristics of a website, such as content and visitor friendliness in order
to gain a better ranking on the organic or unpaid results of search engines’, most
notably, Google’s (Google, 2018). SEO is widely used both in business and in other
sectors of the internet. It can be said that every website that is interested in attracting
more visitors does or at least should do SEO because it is one of the few free ways
to attract more traffic. As a result, the internet is full of guides and other material on
the topic which can be used to learn this very important skill.
Search engines slowly became a necessity when the internet decentralized
information storage. As a response to this need, Alan Emtage, a student of the
McGill University, created the first-ever search engine which he named Archie in
1990. It looked for information stored on other servers using an internet connection
and it is still in operation. The decade saw an influx of competing search engines
which tried to capture the newly found market. Some of the most notable search
engines of the 90s were Excite, Alta Vista, AskJeeves and Google (Zantal-Wiener,
2016). However, Google is currently the dominant search engine worldwide with a
market share of 92% (StatCounter Global Stats, 2018). This is not to say that there’s
no room for growth because there are still quite large markets where Google is not
the dominant search engine. For example, Baidu is the leader in China and Yandex
in Russia.
In the beginning, search engines were simple and so was SEO. As a result, people
resorted to dubious practices when trying to improve their ranking in search results.
These practices are referred to as black hat SEO and some examples of it are
keyword stuffing, link farms and automated queries to Google (WordStream, 2018a).
As a response, many features, such as Universal Search of Google, were introduced
to combat the malpractices and to encourage positive forms of optimization (Stern,
2018). These different kinds of positive ways of optimization are collectively referred
to as white hat SEO and it should be practiced by all web developers. Examples of
white hat SEO are quality content, user-friendliness, and keyword-rich meta tags.
Nowadays, the influx of smartphones is shaping the industry (WordStream, 2018b).
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SEO is mostly used by e-businesses but also by bloggers and other social media
influencers. However, it is the public sector that might most benefit from SEO since
information about public resources can be hard to find.