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Wednesday 20 November 2013

Search Engine Optimization




Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.



The objective of search engine optimization (SEO) is to increase a Website's traffic counts, and ultimately conversions, by getting higher search engine placement for the keywords in the search query. The mission of SEO is to make the site's content worthy of higher search engine ranking for your target audience by being more relevant and competent than the competition's. This SEO optimization process is often viewed as a struggle to rank well for just a few keywords, instead of a struggle to satisfy the needs of those entering the query.That is not really the goal - you should satisfy the user by being an expert and giving them valuable competent information.


SEO is the process of improving the organic ranking of a website with leading search engines. Professional SEO firms help to improve search engine rankings for their clients by modifying their websites to better reflect what search engines are looking for.

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

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. 

When you choose a designer to create a business website, you should ask him or her about search engine optimization, as search engine optimization should be built into your pages. While it's never too late to optimize or tweak pages that have already been published, it's a lot easier and more sensible to include search engine optimization when the page is first written.

SEO Basics :

While there is no magic bullet for writing a Web page that will rank highly in search engines, there are a few things you can do to help your pages do better:

  1. Write strong content.
    If you focus on nothing else, you should focus on the content of your Web pages. Search engines want to provide links to relevant pages, and so they are constantly tuning their programs to read and review the content of Web pages to make sure that it really is about what you say it's about. Content is king on a Web page both for your readers and for search engines.

  2. Write valid HTML.
    Ironically, this is often one step in SEO that many Web developers forget - they focus so much on other aspects of SEO that they forget that simple things like valid HTML can help your pages get spidered much more than meta keywords and meta descriptions.
  
  3. Find good keyword phrases.
    What makes up a good keyword phrase can be tricky, but that is what you should be optimizing your page for. Don't try to come up with every keyword phrase possible. Instead, focus on one phrase that really captures what your page is about, and make sure that that phrase is repeated in the content, the headlines, and links within the page.
    
  4. Don't optimize your entire site.
    This may seem confusing, but many Web developers want to come up with one keyword phrase and optimize every page on the Web site for that phrase. While that makes your life a lot easier, it won't get any of the pages the exposure that you would otherwise want. Instead, focus on optimizing one page at a time - find the keyword phrase that works for that page, and optimize it. Then move on to the next page in your site. If you treat every page as a possible entry page on your Web site, your readers will have more ways to find the site.

Steps for Search Engine Optimization :

1. Website analysis
Before optimizing, a detailed analysis of the web site is very necessary. Content, structure and the target traffic have to be cautiously reviewed.

2. Identify Business Objectives
One has to be very clear as to what does the business aim to achieve. Your business objectives would vary from generating new leads, to increasing sales. The objective should be kept in mind while looking for the key words.

3. Key Word optimization
Extensive analysis is required in this stage. You select a list of key words only after analyzing the competitor’s site, their Meta tags, Key word phrases etc. Then only a final list of key words is prepared.

4. Web Page optimization
One needs to optimize web pages with the selected key words. Care should be taken not to over optimize the pages. The web site has to be search engine as well as user friendly. While doing web page optimization, areas like Meta key words, Meta description, Cross-links, have to be looked into.

5. Web Page submissions
Optimized web pages should be submitted to all the popular search engines. This is the way you get your site indexed. Once the site is indexed your focus should be on achieving high search engine rankings for your key words.

6. Link Building
You increase your visibility by building links. The popularity of your web site increases through this step of link building. Inbound links are one of the crucial factors for web page optimization. Search engines look for inbound links from popular sites while ranking your site.

7. Position Reports
Pre-optimization as well as a post optimization report should be prepared. The former one is for all the key words you finalized before optimizing and the latter is to record the changes after optimization.

8. Analysis and Action plan
Analyze position reports of popular search engines. This helps in checking out the action plan. Keeping an eye over position reports is all the more necessary due to consistent changes in the parameters of search engines. You could lose your coveted first rank any moment.

9. Recurring Tasks
These tasks are carried out to keep your site updated with the changing trends in the field of search engine optimization. You should also make sure that the search engines keep indexing your site and rank them well. 

Differences Between the Major Search Engines :

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

Don't Give Up on SEO :

SEO takes a long time to see results with. Even if you ask a search engine to spider your Web site or a specific page, it can take days for it to show up in the results. And if you're optimizing an existing Web page that's already in the search engine, it can take even longer for your changes to take effect.

Don't get discouraged by your rankings. Remember that unless you've chosen a very unpopular search term, it can be very hard to get a top 10 (first page) ranking in most search engines. Just keep trying - the results are worth the effort.



Regards,

Preeti Bagad [BE(CS)] 
SW Engineer Cum Blogger
www.AeroSoftCorp.com 
www.A-1Soft.com
www.AeroSoft.co.in
www.A1eroSoftseo.com

On Line Assistence :
Gtalk : PreetiB.A1Soft@gmail.com
Y! Messenger : PreetiB.A1Soft@yahoo.com
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