Designing a website so that search engines find the pages easily and index them. The goal is to have a link to a Web page positioned as high up on the first page of the search results as possible, or at least be on the first page. Search engine optimization (SEO) includes the choice of keywords used in the text and the placement of those words on the page, both visible and hidden inside meta tags.
Keep 'Em Guessing
Search engines use different criteria for ranking pages, and those criteria are periodically changed to keep Web page designers from falsely describing their pages and obtaining a permanent, high ranking. An entire industry exists to help website owners obtain high page ranking. See
page ranking,
cloaking,
shadow domain,
meta tag,
site map,
surface Web,
deep Web and
social search engine.