What is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is the methods used to boost the ranking or frequency of a website in results returned by a search engine, in an effort to maximize user traffic to the site (dictionary.com). There are many forms of SEO, but they can generally be split into three categories: White hat, Gray hat, and Black hat SEO. SEO has become one of the defining factors of creating a successful website today.

Search Engine Optimization wasn’t originally necessary when the World Wide Web was first born, as the some of the first existing search engines were very basic, and ranked sites mainly on how many visitors they had. The very first search engine was named “Archie” and was only an ftp site that hosted an index of downloadable directory listings. Due to limited space, only the listings were available and not the contents for each site. (Wordstream.com).

Over time, the web became more popular, and also a massive source of income around the world. As the demand for companies to reach the top of search results was rising, search engines became more complex. People were discovering ways to “cheat” their way to the top of search results, which is one of the reasons search engines had to increase the complexity of their functionality. Search Engine Optimization wasn’t really invented by anyone particular, as it was a collective group of people attempting to gain popularity. There is even much speculation as to who created the term “Search Engine Optimization”

Search Engine Optimization affects our society more than people realize it. Search Engine Optimization has everything to do with what you see on your Google, or any other search results. A SEO Master can essentially control certain parts of web, making everything they want you to see appear. For instance, if a SEO (This acronym is also used as Search engine Optimizer) wants you to see a certain website at the top of the results when you top in a word, he will optimize that specific site or page so that the search engine recognizes it as the top result for what you typed in.

There are many ways to increase a sites search rankings, and there are ethical and unethical ways of doing so.
The most ethical form of SEO is White hat SEO. White Hat SEO can be the most effective form of SEO if it used properly, but can also be very time consuming. Some things that help rank a site high in search results are, high daily traffic, a large amount of backlinks (other sites linking into yours), keywords matching on the site, and general relevenacy to the searchers phrase. An ethically sound, What Hat site, would more than likely be fairly old, very popular, and known of in at least one more form of media.

The topic that I will be discussing for my final project will be on Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is a form of search engine optimization. Specifically, it is a form of search engine optimization that used to exploit the weaknesses within other websites to generate revenue. There are many other forms of SEO, but I find the Black Hat method to be the most intriguing for several reasons.

Black Hat SEO relates to Mass Communication in the sense that it directly manipulates blog and forum sites. Have you ever been reading through a forum or a blog and see a comment that is obviously a “bot” or not a real person? This is the doing of a Black Hat SEO expert. Black Hat SEOs use homemade or underground software to scrape ip addresses and mass post to blogs with their URL to their site or adware links. Some of these posts may seem to be very legitimate, but in the end, they lead the end-user to either downloading adware or tricking search engines into forking over unearned revenue.