IT Consulting

Information technology consulting (also called IT consulting, Computer consultancy, Computing consultancy, technology consulting business and technology services or IT advisory) is a field that focuses on advising businesses on how best to use information technology to meet their business objectives. In addition to providing advice, IT consultancies often estimate, manage, implement, deploy, and administer IT systems on businesses' behalf, known as Outsourcing.
There are different reasons why consultants are called in:
To gain external, more objective advice and recommendations
To gain access to the consultants' specialized expertise
Simply as temporary help during a one-time project, where the hiring of permanent employees is not required
To outsource all or part of the IT services
[edit]Five basic principles

Five basic principles of IT consulting are:
Focus on the Relationship: Understanding the personality and expectations of client, client organization and all other stakeholders
Clearly Defined Role: Defined roles and responsibilities for both clients, other stakeholders and consulting team
Visualize Success: Helping the client see the end at the beginning
You Advise, They Decide: Client is the best person to decide
Be Oriented Towards Results: Ensuring that the solution addresses end user concerns, user training, implementation and maintenance constraints
[edit]Prerequisites and Major obstacles

Once a business owner defined the needs to take a business to the next level, a decision maker will define a scope, cost and a time-frame of the project [1]. The role of the IT consultancy company is to support and nurture the company from the very beginning of the project till the end, and deliver the project not only in the scope, time and cost but also with complete customer satisfaction[1].
[edit]Project Scoping and Planning
The usual problem is that a business owner doesn't know the detail of what the project is going to deliver until it starts the process. In many cases, the incremental effort in some projects can lead to significant financial loss.
The worst problem is that the baseline for evaluating the managers appointed to manage the project becomes blurred - making it more difficult to hold him or her accountable.[2]
[edit]Business Process and System Design
The scope of a project is linked intimately to the proposed business processes and systems that the project is going to deliver. Regardless of whether the project is to launch a new product range or discontinue unprofitable parts of the business, the change will have some impact on business processes and systems. The documentation of your business processes and system requirements are as fundamental to project scoping as an architects plans would be to the costing and scoping of the construction of a building.
[edit]Project Management Support
The most successful business projects are always those that are driven by an employee who has the authority, vision and influence to drive the required changes in a business. It is highly unlikely that a business owner (decision maker or similar) will realize the changes unless one has one of these people in the employment. However, the project leadership role typically requires significant experience and skills which are not usually found within a company focused on day-to-day operations. Due to this requirement within more significant business change projects / programs, outside expertise is often sought from firms which can bring this specific skill set to the company.
[edit]IT Consulting Skills

An IT Consultant needs to possess the following skills:
Advisory skills
Technical skills
Business skills
Communication skills
Management skills
[edit]Consulting fees

Under normal circumstances a fee for IT consulting is measured on a per day, per consultant basis. There is however an alternative option; fixed fee IT Consulting. A fixed fee IT consulting contract applies only to projects which are well defined, for example:
Infrastructure refreshment projects
Network design
Troubleshooting IT Consulting
Implementation of specific well described features, such as monitoring platforms
Infrastructure Capacity Planning
Generally, fixed fee IT consulting is for a specific amount of work, within a defined timeframe.
Many companies are now moving towards a fixed priced IT consulting model.
This trend is expected to continue as more companies now require delivery of IT Consulting services within a defined time and price structure.
Open ended consultancy models generally favour the consulting firm, as the consultancy firm is rewarded on a per day basis, there is no incentive to complete assignments within a fixed time. The result often being project overruns and significant cost overrun.
[edit]Management consulting and IT consulting

There is a relatively unclear line between management consulting and IT consulting. There are sometimes overlaps between the two fields, but IT consultants often have degrees in computer science, electronics, technology, or management information systems while management consultants often have degrees in accounting, economics, Industrial Engineering, finance, or a generalized MBA (Masters in Business Administration).
According to the Institute for Partner Education & Development, IT consultants' revenues come predominantly from design and planning based consulting with a mixture of IT and Business Consulting. This is different from a Systems Integrator in that you do not normally take title to product. Their value comes from their ability to integrate and support technologies as well as determining product and brands.

Logo design

Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect. The logo (ideogram), is the image embodying an organization. Because logos are meant to represent companies' brands or corporate identities and foster their immediate customer recognition, it is counterproductive to frequently redesign logos.

Color is considered important to brand recognition, but it should not be an integral component to the logo design, which could conflict with its functionality. Some colors are formed/associated with certain emotions that the designer wants to convey. For instance loud primary colors, such as red, are meant to attract the attention of drivers on highways are appropriate for companies that require such attention. In the United States red, white, and blue are often used in logos for companies that want to project patriotic feelings. Green is often associated with the health and hygiene sector, and light blue or silver is often used to reflect diet foods. For other brands, more subdued tones and lower saturation can communicate reliability, quality, relaxation, or other traits.

The logo design profession has substantially increased in numbers over the years since the rise of the Modernist movement in the United States in the 1950s.^[13] Three designers are widely^[14] considered the pioneers of that movement and of logo and corporate identity design: The first is Chermayeff & Geismar,^[15] which is the firm responsible for a large number of iconic logos, such as Chase Bank (1964), Mobil Oil(1965), NBC (1984), PBS (1986), National Geographic(2003) and others. Due to the simplicity and boldness of their designs, many of their earlier logos are still in use today. The firm recently designed logos for the Library of Congress and the fashion brand Armani Exchange. Another pioneer of corporate identity design is Paul Rand,^[16] who was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. He designed many posters and corporate identities, including the logos for IBM, UPS, and ABC. Rand died in 1996. The third pioneer of corporate identity design is Saul Bass.^[17] Bass was responsible for several recognizable logos in North America, including both the Bell Telephone logo (1969) and successor AT&T globe (1983). Other well-known designs were Continental Airlines (1968), Dixie (1969), andUnited Way (1972). Later, he would produce logos for a number of Japanese companies as well. He died in 1996.

[edit]Logo Design Process

Designing a good logo is not a simple task and requires a lot of involvement from the marketing team and the design agency (if outsourced). It requires clear idea about the concept and values of the brand as well as understanding of the consumer or target group as marketers call. Broad step in logo design process would be formulating concept, doing initial sketch, finalizing the logo concept, deciding the theme colours and format.

[edit]Psychy of Symbols

The effective design and use of a logo employs the understanding of human behavior. Whether cultural, or internal, people recognize and react to color, shapes, lines, fonts and other symbolic forms with emotions tied to their experiences.

Colors have a broad range of meaning according to different nations and cultures. A color could mean one thing in a particular setting, and something completely different in another.

Peoples minds have been trained to recognize the motion of a line. Horizontal lines often communicate a leveled security. Vertical lines convey dignity, and diagonal lines are full of energy, suggesting either rising or falling, or movement in one direction or another.

[edit]Dynamic logos

Nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink), 1898 poster of the Michelin.

Coca-Cola logo

In 1898 the French tire manufacturer Michelin introduced the Michelin Man, a cartoon figure presented in many different contexts, such as eating, drinking and playing sports.

The famous MTV logo.

By the early 21st century, large corporations such as MTV, Google, Morton Salt and Saks Fifth Avenuehad adopted dynamic logos that change over time from setting to setting.^[18]

[edit]Internet Compatible Logos

A company that use logotypes (wordmarks) may desire a logo that matches the firm's Internet Address. For short logotypes consisting of two or three characters, multiple companies are found to employ the same letters. A "CA" logo, for example, is used by the French Bank Credit Agricole, the Dutch Clothing Retailer C&A and the US Software Corporation CA Technologies, but only one can have the internet domain name CA.com.

In today's interface adaptive world, the use of a logo will be formatted and re-formatted from large monitors to small handheld devices. With the constant size change and re-formatting, logo designers are shifting to a more bold and simple approach, with heavy lines and shapes, and solid colors. This reduces the confusion when mingled with other logos in tight spaces and when stretched and squeezed between mediums.

[edit]Examples

[edit]Corporations, businesses and products

Due to the design, the color, the shape, and eventually additional elements of the logotype, each one can easily be differentiated from other logotypes. For example, a box of Kellogg's cereals will be easily recognized in a supermarket's shelf from a certain distance, due to its unique typography and distinctive red coloring. The same will be true when one is at the airport looking for the booth of theHertz Rent-A-Car company.

Some well-known logos include Apple Inc.'s apple with a bite missing, which started out as a rainbow of color, and has been reduced to a single color without any loss of recognition. Coca-Cola's script is known worldwide, but is best associated with the color red; its main competitor, Pepsi has taken the color blue, although they have abandoned their script logo. IBM, also known as "Big Blue" has simplified their logo over the years, and their name. What started as International Business Machines is now just "IBM" and the color blue has been a signature in their unifying campaign as they have moved to become an IT services company.

There are some other logos that must be mentioned when evaluating what the mark means to the consumer. Automotive brands can be summed up simply with their corporate logo—from the Chevrolet "Bow Tie" mark to the roundel marks of Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz andBMW, to the interlocking "RR" of Rolls-Royce—each has stood for a brand and clearly differentiated the product line.

Other logos that are recognized globally: the Nike "Swoosh" and the Adidas "Three stripes" are two well-known brands that are defined by their corporate logo. When Phil Knight started Nike, he was hoping to find a mark as recognizable as the Adidas stripes, which also provided reinforcement to the shoe. He hired a young student (Carolyn Davidson) to design his logo, paying her $35 for what has become one of the best known marks in the world (she was later compensated again by the company).^[19]

Another logo of global renown is that of Playboy Enterprises. Playboy magazine claims it once received a letter at its Chicago, Illinois offices with its distinctive "bunny" logo as the only identifying mark, appearing where the mailing address normally appears.

Corporate identities are often developed by large firms who specialize in this type of work. However, Paul Rand is considered the father ofcorporate identity and his work has been seminal in launching this field. Some famous examples of his work were the UPS package with a string (replaced in March 2003), IBM and NeXT Computer.

An interesting case is the refinement of the FedEx logo, where the brand consultants convinced the company to shorten their corporate name and logo from "Federal Express" to the popular abbreviation "Fed Ex". Besides creating a shorter brand name, they reduced the amount of color used on vehicles (planes, trucks) and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in paint costs. Also, the right-pointing arrow in the new logo hints at motion.

Logo of Facebook Inc.

Starting about 4 years ago, certain companies, especially online technology companies, began to adopt a common look and feel. Many people refer to that standard as "web 2.0", but there is no official "web 2.0" standard. Web 2.0 logos often use small chunks of large type, with bright and cheery colors. Although there are literally hundreds of fonts used by web 2.0 companies, the logos are generally dominated by soft, rounded san serif fonts such as VAG Rounded (Crowdspring) and Helvetica Rounded (Skype). There are, however, numerous exceptions, as some web 2.0 companies have used classic fonts (Trade, News Gothic, Frutiger, Helvetica), while others have chosen to differentiate completely, using fonts like Klavika(Facebook).

[edit]Sports

The Cap logo of the New York Yankees.

See also: Baseball uniforms#Graphics and logos and Major League Baseball#MLB uniforms

[edit]Logos in subvertising

See also: Culture jamming and Guerrilla communication

The wide recognition received by the most famous logos provides the brand's critics with the possibility ofmeme-hacking, a process also known as subvertising, turning the marketing message carried by the logo (either in its pristine form, or subtly altered) into a vehicle for an alternative message, frequently highly critical to the brand in question. An example is the AdBusters' corporate flag, a U.S. flag with the stars replaced by major corporate logos.

Virtually all distinctive design elements related to brands or logos can be subject to subvertising. Two groups known for subverting established logos and brands are ®™ark and AdBusters.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:
sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers, and
sending email messages over the Internet, as email did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network email and FIDO).
Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $400 million on email marketing in 2006
Advantages
Email marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:
An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.[2]
Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
Over half of Internet users check or send email on a typical day.[3]
Email is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.[4]
[edit]Disadvantages
A report issued by the email services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.[5]
Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM),[6] the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.
[edit]Opt-in email advertising

Opt-in email advertising, or permission marketing, is a method of advertising via email whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it. This method is one of several developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of email marketing.[7]
Opt-in email marketing may evolve into a technology that uses a handshake protocol between the sender and receiver.[7] This system is intended to eventually result in a high degree of satisfaction between consumers and marketers. If opt-in email advertising is used, the material that is emailed to consumers will be "anticipated". It is assumed that the consumer wants to receive it, which makes it unlike unsolicited advertisements sent to the consumer. Ideally, opt-in email advertisements will be more personal and relevant to the consumer than untargeted advertisements.
A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products.[8] In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.
With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically—known as Drip Marketing. They can also segment their promotions to specific market segments.[9]
[edit]Legal requirements

In 2002 the European Union introduced the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. Article 13 of the Directive prohibits the use of email addresses for marketing purposes. The Directive establishes the opt-in regime, where unsolicited emails may be sent only with prior agreement of the recipient.
The directive has since been incorporated into the laws of member states. In the UK it is covered under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003[10] and applies to all organisations that send out marketing by some form of electronic communication.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 authorizes a US $16,000 penalty per violation for spamming each individual recipient. Therefore, many commercial email marketers within the United States utilize a service or special software to ensure compliance with the Act. A variety of older systems exist that do not ensure compliance with the Act. To comply with the Act's regulation of commercial email, services typically require users to authenticate their return address and include a valid physical address, provide a one-click unsubscribe feature, and prohibit importing lists of purchased addresses that may not have given valid permission.
In addition to satisfying legal requirements, email service providers (ESPs) began to help customers establish and manage their own email marketing campaigns. The service providers supply email templates and general best practices, as well as methods for handling subscriptions and cancellations automatically. Some ESPs will provide insight/assistance with deliverability issues for major email providers. They also provide statistics pertaining to the number of messages received and opened, and whether the recipients clicked on any links within the messages.
The CAN-SPAM Act was updated with some new regulations including a no fee provision for opting out, further definition of "sender", post office or private mail boxes count as a "valid physical postal address" and definition of "person". These new provisions went into effect on July 7, 2008.

Web design

Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and programming elements are shaped by the web designer to produce the page seen on the web browser.[1] Web designers utilize markup language, most notably HTML for structure and CSS for presentation to develop pages that can be read by web browsers. In the world of Web 2.0 other programming languages, such as javaScript, PHP, ASP.net, and Perl, are used to develop websites that are both interactive and engaging.
As a whole, the process of web design includes conceptualization, planning, post-production, research, advertising as well as media control that is applied to the pages within the site by the designer or group of designers with a specific purpose. The site itself can be divided into its main page, also known as the home page, which cites the main objective as well as highlights of the site's daily updates; which also contains hyperlinks that functions to direct viewers to a designated page within the site's domain.
Best practices

Ideally, web designers should strive to write code that is valid HTML and CSS. In doing so it makes it easier to correct problems, edit pages, or update pages. Additionally, keeping your HTML files and CSS files separate helps to make it easier to make changes. For example, having a separate CSS file allows for aesthetic changes to be made to the entire site rather than to just a single page. If CSS rules are included within a single HTML page, changes would have to be made to each and every page. The reasoning is that HTML should only be used for raw content and CSS be used to manipulate the content for aesthetic style. This is true for scripting files as well.[citation needed]
[edit]Changes and updates

Initial website designs normally need small tweaks and changes after they go live, but major updates and re-designs may be undertaken periodically.
Changes to websites almost always provoke a backlash from its regular users.[2] The reason for this is primarily that change is disruptive to the user: for example, the link that the user previously learned was always in the lower left corner is now "missing", and the user must search the page to discover its new location. The user is disoriented, frustrated, slowed down, and needs time to learn and adapt to the new arrangement. On websites with users who spend significant amounts of time each day using, like Facebook or Wikipedia, users normally respond to even moderate changes with noisy protests and empty threats to leave the website.[2]
Within a few weeks or months, however, most users have adapted to the changes and no longer object to them.[2] For example, the signature feature of Facebook, a news feed, drew millions of complaints when it first appeared, but users now say that it is an important and highly desirable feature.[2]
Major websites may try to minimize this with phased rollouts of changes, testing the new design with a small number of randomly selected users, describing the importance of the upcoming changes in advance, and offering users the option of keeping the old design until they have acclimated to the new one. However, the primary cure for complaints is simply to wait.

Services

Services

Website Design
Email Marketing
Logo Design
IT Consulting
Web Development
E-commerce
Video Production
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Marketing (sem)
Pay per click managment (ppc)
Social media  marketing

Technologies  


HTML / CSS
Javascript
XML
Illustator
Photoshop
Final Cut
Premiere pro
After effects
Flash
WordPress

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
The acronym "SEOs" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.


Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.[2] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997.[3] The first documented use of the term Search Engine Optimization was John Audette and his company Multimedia Marketing Group as documented by a web page from the MMG site from August, 1997.[4]
Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches.[5][unreliable source?] Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.[6]
By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.[original research?]
Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "backrub," a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.[7] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.[8] Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.[9]
By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.[10] The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. SEO service providers, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.[11][12] SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.[13]
In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users.[14] In 2008, Bruce Clay said that "ranking is dead" because of personalized search. It would become meaningless to discuss how a website ranked, because its rank would potentially be different for each user and each search.[15]
In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank.[16] On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting.[17] As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated Javascript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and Javascript. [18]
In December 2009, Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results.[19]
Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.[20]
Relationship with search engines



Yahoo and Google offices
By 1997, search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.[21]
Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEO service providers. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web,[22] was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.[23] Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.[24] Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.[25]
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization.[26][27] Google has a Sitemaps program[dead link][28] to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Toolbox provides a way from webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allowing users to determine the crawl rate, and how many pages have been indexed by their search engine.
Methods

Getting indexed
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.[29] Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.[dead link][30] Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.[31] Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.[32]
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.[33] Additionally, search engines sometimes have problems with crawling sites with certain kinds of graphic content, flash files, portable document format files, and dynamic content.[34]
Preventing crawling
Main article: Robots Exclusion Standard
To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.[35]
Increasing prominence
A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility.[36] Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic.[36] Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's meta data, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the "canonical" meta tag[37] or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page's link popularity score.
Image search optimization

Image search optimization is the process of organizing the content of a webpage to increase relevance to a specific keyword on image search engines. Like search engine optimization, the aim is to achieve a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of traffic from search engines.
Image search optimization techniques can be viewed as a subset of search engine optimization techniques that focuses on gaining high ranks on image search engine results.
Unlike normal SEO process, there isn't much to do for ISO. Making high quality images accessible to search engines and providing some description about images is almost all that can be done for ISO.
White hat versus black hat

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.[38] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.[39]
An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines[40][26][27] are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility,[41] although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.[42] Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.[43]
As a marketing strategy

SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, depending on the site operator's goals.[44] A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate.[45]
SEO may generate an adequate return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.[46] It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.[47] Seomoz.org has suggested that "search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines." Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.[48]
International markets

Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.[49] In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007.[50] As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany.[51] While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany.[51] As of June 2008, the marketshare of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise.[52] That market share is achieved in a number of countries.
As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable markets where this is the case are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the Czech Republic where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders.
Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.[51]
Legal precedents

On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted."[53][54]
In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. Kinderstart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses.