Search Engine Optimization

On 05.03.09, In Gossip, by Kalyan

Introduction to SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the technique of increasing web traffic to a website from search engines. It is also the process of promoting a site to the top results in a search engine for specific keywords.
Advantages of SEO
As mentioned, SEO is a technique to increase web traffic to a particular website. [...]

Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the technique of increasing web traffic to a website from search engines. It is also the process of promoting a site to the top results in a search engine for specific keywords.

Advantages of SEO

As mentioned, SEO is a technique to increase web traffic to a particular website. So, if a website is so popular on the search engines, then users are automatically driven to that website. This will obviously increase demand for that page and advertisers would like to have their ads on that site. And this obviously means money.

Having said that, it doesn’t really mean that you can’t do anything about it. You have to make sure that you put in all the keywords, meta data and stuff in the web page to make sure that it is indexed in the search engine database.

How to make sure that your page is ranked at the top in all search engines?

Big question! Let’s take a loook at what exactly happens with search engines.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN have their own algorithms to crawl a web page and then index it. When a search term is entered in the search engine by a user, the relevancy of the content is checked from the indexed pages and then the results are shown in order of relevancy. Since the algorithms used by the search engines are different, there is no guarantee that a page ranked 2 in Google has to be ranked 2 in Yahoo, it can be ranked 100 in Yahoo. There is no consistency in the search engines.

I bet you didn’t understand that. Let’s take a closer look.

Search engines are not humans. They can’t think nor can they see a web page the way a human does. All they can do is read the content of a web page. So, content is the first and foremost thing for a search engine.
All search engines have softwares called Spiders, which crawl on a web page and go through the content. After they finish crawling, they index the page in a huge database that also contains the indexing results of other web pages. Now, when a user types a keyword in that particular search engine, it looks up the indexed pages in the database. If there is more than 1 page with the requested search keyword, it calculates the relevancy of the indexed pages against the search term and then displays the results in order of relevancy.

Again, the algorithms used by these search engines differ in logic from one search engine to the other. As a result, in most cases there is no rule that a particular web page has the same page rank in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Having said that, you have to put in your efforts to make sure that the search engines spiders crawl your page and index it against relevant search words. How do we do that?

Importance of Keywords, Meta data, and links

Keywords are something which can keep your web page float in the current situation where we have billions of pages in the web. Keywords are a way to promote your page in search rankings. Let us, for example, say that a person has a website about Food. Given that it is one of the most frequently searched term, the person has to make sure that he includes all kinds of keywords related to the word “food” – like, “spicy food”, “junk food”, “fast food”, “chinese food”, “indian food” and so on. This will help the spiders to understand the relevancy of the food to your page and will hopefully put it in the top results next time.
One great tool to search relevant keywords and put up in your website is the Google Keyword Search.

We then have the Meta Data. Though this is an old technique to increase traffic to a page, this is still considered as a first step towards SEO. There were times when the search engines only used to look up the meta data and rank a page. Times have changed and so have search engine algorithms. Meta data is not the most important things to do these days but doing it will be no harm. So, please make sure that you have meta tags, meta description and meta keywords for your site.

Links are now growing up to be one of the most important things to superior SEO. One has to make sure that there are no broken links in a website. Also, if possible keywords should be included in the Link itself along with a title tag that gives a description of where the link leads to. Spiders look for links in a web page so, they can search other pages in the website and index them through links. It is important to make sure that all pages in a website can be accessed through something called a “Sitemap“. A page that would explain the website structure.

Content in a web page

Making sure that keywords and links are present alone doesn’t guarantee you a spot in the top page ranks. The main thing is the Content. Search Engine algorithms, these days, are so mature that they can make out a fake website from the content itself. So, content is very important. Keep the content genuine and updated and the traffic will flow in automatically. Automatically? Will it?

Promote your website

Not literally automatic. But there are socail networking sites like Facebook, Digg, Delicious etc., in which you can promote your site. Present the first paragraph of your website in a very interesting way and link it to your webpage in a network like Digg. If people like it, they will visit your website and traffic will automatically flow. This will also ensure a good page rank. However, the content needs to be genuine or, you are bound to land in trouble and your website also might face a possible ban in search engines.

So, please go through SEO carefully and make sure that you do it the most genuine way and you will be rewarded with good page ranks.

Did I miss anything? Please let me know by discussing it in the comments section below.