SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranked listing in the search results page of a search engine (SERP). This is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines in the most effective manner possible. The higher position you can achieve in the results of a search, the greater the chance that your site will be visited by a user. This makes your web site and its content attractive, relevant and visible to search engines and web searchers.
It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site. Why is this important? Consider what it would be like if no one could easily find your place of business, or even your telephone number. Most businesses could not continue for long in such a situation. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine and ultimately rank high in position for their targeted keyword or keyword’s. The same thing can happen with your web site if people cannot easily locate it. Traffic volume, if it existed at all, slows to a crawl. Potentially valuable customers never even know you are there.
How do search engines work
How are web pages indexed?
How do searches really work?
Only a select few search engine developers really know for sure, and this is generally very closely held proprietary information. The process is routinely improved, as all useful computer software is. The information that the developers of the search engines will release, combined with the results of research into why certain pages are at the top of the list of results of certain searches, help all of us in our SEO. Using this information, we can make a reasonable determination of what techniques can be used to enhance a web site’s visibility and effectiveness in the search engines.
Through an analysis of your existing or proposed web site, we can recommend and implement changes that can dramatically improve your site’s chances of being found. Some of these changes may alter the actual content of what is displayed on a page. Many of these changes, however, have no effect on what a user sees when visiting your site. So SEO can really help you. Why not take it a little further and get your site listed for all kinds of searches. That should really bring the traffic in, right? It just might, but probably not for very long.
When using various search engines, you may have noticed that some search results have little, if anything, to do with what you were looking for. Some of these pages may even redirect you to another web site altogether. The owners of these pages have one goal: to get you in the door (so to speak), no matter what lies or cheats they have to use to do it.
Search Engine “Don’t s”
The following search engine optimization techniques are often called spamming, and should be avoided at all costs:
- Automatically generated doorway pages
- Cloaking and false redirects
- Keyword stuffing
- Hidden text or hidden links
- Pages loaded with irrelevant words
- Duplicated content on multiple pages
- Misspelling of well-known web sites
- Unrelated and centralized link farms
- Methods that try to trick search engines
These and other similar techniques, while sometimes effective in generating an increase in traffic to your site, quickly fail. Imagine putting a “Detour” sign in the street in front of your place of business, forcing traffic into your parking lot. Yes, your parking lot is full, but how many of those people actually wanted to be there? How many of those people will want to shop there after witnessing such a trick? How long will it take the local police to remove the sign?
The same thing happens to web sites that use such nefarious techniques. People are brought to a site where they had no intention of going. Do you think they will stay to shop? When the developers of a search engine discover these types of tricks, they will often remove the site from their index entirely.
Search Engine Optimization and Advertising
In today’s net-savvy world it has become common for any business to have a website which they use mostly for advertising their products and services. With the advent of search engines it has become even easier for the customers to search for the stuff online. For a website to be successful its link should land in the first three pages which the search engine brings and the rank of the page should be high which means many visitors come to the site. This can be achieved by applying search engine optimization or popularly known as SEO. This is a marketing strategy which increases the quality and quantity of traffic flow to a particular website via search engines.
SEO not only affects the search engine results, but also image search, video search and industry specific vertical search engines. It determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a spider crawls through a page to gather links which lead to other pages and stores those pages on the server of the search engine. The information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer, whose job is to extract information from those pages such as the keywords and their weights, the location of the page and other links that are stored for the spider to crawl in future.
In the beginning, the search engine optimizer algorithms were dependent on the keywords, Meta tags, and index files provided by the Webmaster. Meta tags provided information about a particular page, but using them for indexing the pages didn’t prove to be successful as some Webmasters added irrelevant Meta tags to increase the number of hits and earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML of the web pages to achieve a good rank for the page. But this was a case of abuse as it fetched irrelevant pages.
Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithm, which were difficult for the webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated mathematically by functions using strength and quantity of the inbound links. The higher the rank of the page the more chances it had to be viewed by a person. Later algorithms were developed which considered various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as hyperlink. Since the webmasters couldn’t manipulate the page rank, they began exchanging, selling and buying links, which lead to link spamming and even creation of numerous sites dedicated for this purpose.
Algorithms became more complex by every passing day and top search engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased, advertisers were roped in to pay for it, which finally resulted in high quality web pages. Although investing in SEO is very fruitful, but at the same time is risky because without any prior notice the algorithms being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing visitors to the page. Many consultants are available in the market that provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code of the web site like menus, shopping carts and sometimes even the content of the website to draw more traffic. Search engines like Yahoo has algorithms that extract pages not according to the page rank but according to the cost per click or set fee, that is if a advertiser desires that the page containing his ad be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it. This is a point of controversy, as only the big businesses will be able to increase the number of hits of their page but not the small business who might be having a better quality page.
Google Ad Words explores ads which have words typed in the search box by the surfer. The Million Dollar Homepage started the concept of Pixel advertising, which is a graphical kind of advertising. Depending on the pixels, the space is sold to the advertiser. Keyword advertising involves advertisers who buy URLs of a site and place their ads at that location. Thus SEO is a market in its own which is yielding great results for businesses on the Internet.
How do you rank?
The next time you use a search engine, look for your own site. What words would someone search for that should bring them to your site? Is your site listed in those search results?
SEO is the tool that can be used to insure that your site is listed as close as possible to the top of the relevant search results.
Without SEO it will be as if those customers drive by your shop without even knowing that you are there. Should SEO be important to you? You can bank on it.-