subject: Search Engine Optimization Tactics And Overview [print this page] 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, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Search Engine Optimization Process
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords 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.
Relationship with search engines
Relationship with Search Engines
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.
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, 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. Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.
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. Google has a Sitemaps program 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.
How Search Engines Work
The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.
What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.
After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you to get higher rankings.
When a search request comes, the search engine processes it i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.
There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.
Top 10 search engine optimization techniques
There are a lot of techniques that can be used in search engine optimization that can help or hurt you when it comes to SEO. Some of the big ones that can hurt is keyword stuffing and page cloaking. You want to always make sure that you are building a site for your visitors first and foremost. The robots arent quite as interested in your content as you think, sorry.
You can easily make your site search engine optimized by follow 10 easy steps that will make sure everything is ready for Google to go through and understand what your pages and site are about. This can help you to get more traffic from search engines by ranking well. Once you rank well, of course, you need to make sure that you are persuading the visitors to actually click on your search listing. The relevant and quality traffic is why we all have web sites and want to rank well in search engines, right?
The 10 Great SEO tips for your site
Content
As it sounds this is the number one for any search marketing strategy, it is impossibly important to ensure that you have content worth viewing. Without this one simply step to ensure that there is a reason for someone to be on your site, everything else is useless. There are a lot of great sites to find inspiration for writing great content that works.
Incoming Links
A link is a link is a link, but without the simplest form you arent going to do well in search engines. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have the proper anchor text for your incoming links. The easiest way to gain quality links from other sites is to link to sites to let them know your site is there and hope for a reciprocal link. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site.
Web site title
Making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. It is important for click-through rates in the search results. Pay attention to what you click on when you are searching in Google, I know that I dont always click the first results. Using great titles and topics on your site will bring you more traffic than a number one listing. Most of the time it is within the first page, but I skim through the titles to see which looks to be more on-topic for my search query.
Heading tags
When you are laying out your sites content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the h1 tag, which says this is what this block of copy is about. Making sure you understand heading tag structure is very important. You only want to have one (or two) h1 tags per a page. It is important to not just throw anything into an h1 tag and hope you rank for it.
Internal Linking
Making sure that your internal linking helps robots (and visitors!) to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots (and visitors!) more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you dont want to rank in Google that you add a nofollow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your sites topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.
Keyword Density
Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You dont want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it bcomes up often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more then 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you arent shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about context and relevance just make sure it is good, quality copy.
Sitemaps
It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.
Meta Tags
Everyone will tell you that meta tags dont matter, they do. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.
URL Structure
Ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important.
Domain
It can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isnt a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.
Why SEO Is Important for your Website
A website is like an investment wherein you spend money on the domain name and hosting as well as exert effort on designing it and filling each page of informative content. And as an investment, you expect a great return in the long run. But how could a website become profitable if you dont market it?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of making a website rank in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It is the procedure done by marketers to boost their sites popularity online as well as gather visitors and prospective clients. It is almost like traditional advertising except that its done online and a little less hyped.
While it is easy to launch a website, marketing it can get tricky. As of today, there are more than billions of websites on-line. As e-commerce slowly dominates the business world, every entrepreneur is taking advantage of the trend and ventured to internet marketing as well. You can already imagine how stiff the competition is. But if you understand SEO and do it correctly, you may actually have a chance of succeeding in this business.
Visibility of Web Development SEO can boost the number of visitors for your website. By selecting keywords or phrases, which are related or fully describe what your sites content is about, your target audience will be able to find you faster and easier through search engines. In traditional marketing, it is you who should look for prospective customers. In SEO, it is your customer searching for you. All that you need to do is be found by incorporating the right keywords to your site and building links to it as much as you can.
Concerned Traffic SEO plays a critical role in driving qualitative web traffic to your website. Qualitative traffic is basically potential customers who are most likely to purchase your products and services. By optimizing highly targeted keywords and phrases in the content of your site, your prospects would be able to find your business online. They would then be able to browse and purchase your products and services from your website.
Return On Investment A comprehensive and well strategized SEO campaign can rake in a high ROI for your business than any other type of marketing medium. This would be achieved by driving a steady influx of qualitative traffic to your website, which would bolster your sales potential and in turn increase your profits overall.
Ranking Your SEO campaign can be considered to be your flagship medium as your website would be able to attain long term top ranking positions on search engines. Compared to other search engine marketing mediums such as pay per click marketing, SEO offers a long term solution for your marketing campaign.
Measurable Figures This is another advantage of SEO. You can actually quantify the results of your effort. And tools such as Google Analytics and Alexa are there to help you in monitoring your websites performance in search engines. There are visual presentations (graphs and charts) to elaborate details on conversion rates, keyword popularity, referral sites, actual traffic and page views, and other information you want to know about your website.
Hope it Helps You! Looking for your valuable comments,
