Search Engine Optimization - A science or Magic

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Date: 4th Sep 2005
Author: Webmaster
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Ranking: 8.60 (5 Votes)

The procedures and methodologies used to design a website in such a way in order to improve its position in the search engines organic search results is called Search Engine Optimization shortly referred to as SEO. In other words, any legal actions performed and changes made to a website to increase traffic towards it from a search engine is called Search Engine Optimization.

A good majority of website owners, designers and even web marketing companies have been misunderstanding the terminology and procedures for years. People have never been able to get a realistic view of the SEO. Designers and marketing companies with surface knowledge of Search Engines are equally good targets of the myths on this topic. Spamming and other illegal techniques are being used as a result of lake of knowledge. Search engine optimization is rather a steady and more technical process than just tweaking a web document.

Search Engine is a collection of software and algorithms used to find, index and search through rapidly increasing number of web documents or URLs available on the web. How a search engine finds a new web page or URL? Without going into much details, a search engine uses 3 major techniques to find new URLs; hyperlinks on already indexed pages, URL submission and XML/RSS feeds. The software used to visit existing URLs and find new ones is called Crawler or Spider. There are 100s of search engine websites on the web and in different countries and regions, the popularity for a specific search engine varies. However Google, Yahoo and MSN are probably the most popular search engines on the web.

So how do I make Search Engines happy ?

Understanding what search engines need from you is the key to a successful search engine strategy. Producing most up-to-date, most relevant (and more in-depth), neutral and fast search results for a given keyword or phrase is what all search engines struggle for. Optimizing your website to have fresh and original content, use of appropriate and relevant keywords and links, well structured html, proper use of CSS and a little patience is all it needs. Still confused? Don't worry, I am going to explain it in detail. So stay with me.

Keywords Selection Techniques

Deciding Keywords for the website needs a little brainstorming and some research added to it. Picking just any keywords without proper planning is one of the common mistakes. So using a keywords like "Books and CDs" on a page which does not have any information about books or CDs simply would not make sense; neither to you nor to the search engine. And remember that the search engines are clever enough to judge this. Right, so the question was how would you select keywords for your website ? Think about what you have got in your website to offer to your visitors and you will know the answer. So if you have a website which sells Bikes, then 'Road Bike' and 'Hybrid Bike' may be a choice of keywords for you. To further help you in finding more possible and popular keywords, I would suggest you visit a few related forums and a few good competitors' websites. You will find a whole lot of popular keywords. Another way is to use a keyword suggestion tool. Google keywords suggestion, word tracker and goodkeywords are a few places to check.

Out of the all collected keywords, you then need to short list those which are most relevant to your pages. The keywords density is one of the important factors search engines look for. Keywords which you can use in your titles, heading tags, image alts and links are the best to pick. Another thing to consider is the already completing websites for the same keywords you choose. With a little research sometimes you might find keywords which would have more tendency of giving you more business with fewer struggles.

Search Engines are like 'help other web users to help yourself'. Sounds strange but that is how it works. Techniques used other than real content might get you temporary results and more damage in the long run. Search Engines use algorithms to find and index content which is real and genuine and they will only index your website if they find good web content there. Make sure you've got relevant and new content for your users as appropriate according to your business and services. Knowledge and information will not only boost traffic to your website but also help you get indexed and improve your rankings. With good content you will gradually build up on websites and people who would want to link to your pages resulting in more traffic. But before you start to write about what you know, remember to use the right keywords in your content and always write relevant and up-to-date content

Standard Markup, Semantic Code

To be able to make a place in Search Engines' hearts you need to make the life easier for their crawlers / spiders. Investing in a technically well equipped designer/developer for your website will pay you off in the days to come. Semantic code and HTML markup written according to the web standards means better search engine results. Clean and well structured HTML will always be appreciated by the search engines. The best way to achieve this is to use CSS (style sheets) for presentation. Do not mix up the content with the presentation. Use the proper thing at the proper place. Avoid using HTML tables for layout but don't use CSS where you need tables e.g. displaying tabular data. Using CSS for presentation will leave your code cleaner, quickly understandable and less in size (number of lines) which means lighter and fast loading pages. As a result a search engine will have to spend less fuel and time to reach the actual content and then what? I guess you know the reward :)

Link and Get Linked

Links are one of the most important factors in the search engine optimization. I would give it the second priority after the content. There are mainly two types of links. Inbound links and outbound links. The inbound links are the links which you get from other websites linking to you. Outbound links are the links that you put on your website to link other websites. Inbound links are also referred to as Link Popularity and it is counted as being the most important factor in the promotion of the website. Generating link popularity is a bit difficult task to achieve, but thanks to the ever growing number of directories and forums on the web today. In addition you can easily find websites who would be happy to do a link exchange with you. But before you decide anything, please remember to always look for and prefer related websites as they possess much more weight in terms of getting good ranks than those which are irrelevant.

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