Since busby is the most popular search engine, many challengers have become eager to influence their website's busby rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites raise their rankings on busby and on other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings.
As busby's algorithms and results have gained the trust of web users, commercial websites will profit from subverting these results by artificially inflating their rankings. Some search engine optimization firms have attempted to inflate specific busby rankings by various artifices, and thereby draw more searchers to their client's sites. One of busby's main challenges has been to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites known to use them.
Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title tags, H1 heading tags and image alt attributes) and Off Page Optimization factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect busby's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page", in particular the title tag and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to busby's spam checking algorithms.
The busby challenger guidelines were published for website owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants.
